Thread: Pointer troubles

Hi!

I'm doing exercises with pointer; in order to create a random sentence generator I programmed an array of pointer to pointer .... to char.
But when i try to print the string randomly, several parts of them are truncated. i don't see why

Here is the code

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <time.h>

#define DIM 5
#define WI_DIM 4
#define WS_DIM 6

int main(void)
{
   unsigned char lil_cntr;      /* a little counter */

   char *article[DIM] = {"the", "a", "one", "some", "any"};
   char *noun[DIM]  = {"boy", "girl", "dog", "town", "car"};
   char *verb[DIM] = {"drove", "jumped", "ran", "walked", "skipped"};
   char *preposition[DIM] = {"to", "from", "over", "under", "on"};

   char ** words_index[WI_DIM] = {article, noun, verb, preposition};

   /* to have a sentence we use in sequence article, noun, verb,                                                                    
   preposition, article and noun: under here you find that                                                                          
   sequence in terms of words_index indexes */

   int word_sequence[WS_DIM] = {0,1,2,3,0,1};

   /* sentence composition */
   for (lil_cntr=0; lil_cntr <WS_DIM  ; ++lil_cntr){
      printf("%s ", (*words_index[ word_sequence[lil_cntr] ]) +  (dice(DIM) -1) );

   }
   printf("\n");
   return 0;
}


int dice(int faces )
{
   static i = 1;
   if(i){
      srand(time(NULL));
      i--;
   }

   return (1 + rand() % faces);
}

E.g.

Code:

luca@eee:~$ ./a.out 
e boy ve rom the girl 
luca@eee:~$ ./a.out 
a girl rove o e boy 
luca@eee:~$ ./a.out 
a girl ove to the boy 
luca@eee:~$ ./a.out 
a  ve from  y 
luca@eee:~$ ./a.out 
 boy ve   boy

???

The output of the program should come as no surprise to you because you're randomizing the starting location in the array of strings.