Thread: question 1-9 The c programming language K&R

Hi, I am relatively new to programming and reading through Kernigan and ritchies book. Everything was going fine untill i encountered this question that has struck me for a while. The question is :

" write a program that copy it's input to it's output replacing each string of one or more blanks by a single blank "

The output presented below prints -1 and as in the exercise i would like that more than one blank is produced as a blank. What am i doing wrong? (probably a lot)

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main(VOID)
{
int c;
int blanks = 0;
while((c = getchar()) != EOF){
    if(c == ' ')
        putchar(c);
    if(c != ' ')
        putchar(blanks);
}
blanks = c;


printf("%d,%d", c, blanks);

No it's not what i wanted to do. Now that i understand a bit better (not completely) i have adjusted the code to this:

Code:

int main()
{
int c;
int blanks = 0;
printf("Enter a spaced sentence!\n");
while((c = getchar()) !=EOF){
    if(c == ' ')
        putchar(' ');
    if(c != ' ')
        putchar(c);

However i seem to miss the if statements that reduces blanks that are > 1 to 1. Therefore the written output is reproduced but not formatted. How to go about this task? I think i need to decrement but before that i would need a condition.