Thread: Problems with strings and for loops

forget about returning a value from checkchar, and pass a pointer to correctguess to the function instead, in order to increment the counter. Doing this will also allow you to compare correctguess to wordlength without any adjustments - I was mistaken before when I said that the 'e' guess would make correctguess a couple less than wordlength.

One possible problem with this method is that what happens if the user decides to enter 'e' twice for the sake of it?

number of 'e's in cheese == 3;
first run through checkchar with 'e',
correctguess == 3;
second run through checkchar with 'e',
function still checks and finds 3 'e's in the word2bguessed,
as a result,
correctguess == 6 (which also means correctguess == wordlength)


Here is an alternative method, return the number of '*'s in the usercorrect string...
Assuming you initialize the number of '*'s in the usercorrect to == the number of characters in the word2bguessed, the number of '*'s in the usercorrect will be equal to the number of characters that the user has yet to guess correctly.

Originally Posted by petedee

Its ok, i seem to have fixed it, i still used scanf but i changed "%s" to " %c" it seems to have done the trick...

FYI,

Code:

ch = getchar();

will do exactly what

Code:

scanf("%c", &ch);

does, only faster and neater. scanf() does so much work analyzing your format string then reading the keyboard that for a char it's just not worth it.

Also, as you start using more comples input, you'll find scanf() causes more problems than it solves. You'd be better off using the simple I/O function and leave scanf() behind.

Its all fixed! Thanks for you help guys, doubt i could have ever done this without your help

>i don't know this because i don't know how many right guesses and wrong guesses the user will input.
This is a classic problem for programmers. Do you go with the simple solution and restrict the size to some arbitrary value? Or do you create a data structure that can resize itself dynamically? My recommendation is to set a maximum size and use a simple array to get your program working. Then you can add features to it, such as a dynamic array or a linked list.

in the order of your questions starting from do you need a for loop
yes, it's good programming practise to do so, *shrugs* could be anything, depending on how you want to use it, you should stop treating usedchars as a string.

last answer in detail because it's the one where I can do the most good.
as you know by now, strings == char arrays.
However, I think you are not yet aware of what that really means when printing stuff out.
here's a crash course of the printf format conversion specifier:
%c == print out one character
%s == prints out an array of character that must be terminated by a '\0' character

if the string, aka array of characters, is not terminated by a '\0' character, and you print it out using the %s, printf won't know where to stop and will keep printing until it hits a value in your computer's memory that looks like '\0' to it, hence the gibberish that you're getting.
/*** EDIT ***/
For that matter, your for loop also won't know where to stop if you didn't manually insert a '\0' into the array...
/*** END EDIT ***/

try replacing the line
printf("%s", usedchars);
with this
printf("%c", usedchars[k]);

as a suggestion, since I'm assuming that you are using this function before you call the checkchar function, try to get this function to return the character if it hasn't been used before, and return a 0 if a match is found.

How's this for an idea:

What's the absolute maximum of guesses you can have? 26!
A 26 character array initialized to TRUE can be used to represent all letters not guessed.

Each time a letter is guessed
-- Test the corresponding array element for FALSE.
-- If it's TRUE, set the corresponding array element to FALSE.
-- If FALSE, error

Is this what you are meaning to do tzuchan?

Code:

int usedcharacters (char usedchars [], char let2bg)
{
 
	int k;
	for(k = 0; usedchars[k] != '\0' && usedchars[k] != let2bg; k++); /*loop until end character is not null and is not the character to be searched */
	{
		if(usedchars[k] == '\0')  /*if at end of the array*/
		{
			usedchars[k] = let2bg; /* adds guessed character to that which is being searched */
			usedchars[k+1] = '\0'; /* adds null value so string can be searched again */
			printf ("%c", usedchars [k]); /*prints what used characters there are that have already being searched*/
			return usedchars [k]; /*returns used character*/
		}
		else /*if the character is not at end i.e first character guessed*/
		{
			return '\0';	/*add null value so can be searched again */
		}
	}
 
}

Its a great piece of code but how can i store the value so that it wont disappear when i leave the function? what do you mean by " if(usedcharacters(...) == '\0')"?

**** EDIT ****

Ok running this thing through the debugger for some bizarre reason (i have no idea why) the letter K is assigned the value 12 as soon as it enters the for loop, any idea why this is? I changed it back to zero in the debugger and it seems to work fine?

As long as you pass in the usedchars array from the main function and you initialize it as
usedchars[maxnumofguess+1] = "";
the usedchars array will become your store of which characters have been entered before.

first of all, depending on how you initialized your usedchars (in my logic, usedchars starts of being empty, with usedchar[0] == '\0'), you should get k != 0.

for(k = 0; usedchars[k] != '\0' && usedchars[k] != let2bg; k++); //<--the semicolon here results in k running from 0 until when then condition is met without excuting anysort of codes.

Code:

int usedcharacters (char usedchars [], char let2bg)
{
 
	int k;
	for(k = 0; usedchars[k] != '\0' && usedchars[k] != let2bg; k++); 
/*loop until character is not null or is not the character to be searched */
	{
		if(usedchars[k] == '\0')  /*if at end of the array*/
		{
			usedchars[k] = let2bg; 
/* adds guessed character to list of characters that user has pressed*/
			usedchars[k+1] = '\0';
/* adds null value so string can be searched again */
			printf ("%c", usedchars [k]); 
/* This line only prints one character if and only if it hasn't been entered before*/
			return usedchars [k]; /*returns character that hasn't been used before*/
		}
		else /*if the character is not at end i.e first character guessed*/
		{
			return '\0';	
 /*returns a null value so that you can tell if the character has been used before. */
		}
	}
 
}

this function returns a char value. if the char value is not equal (usedcharacter(...) != '\0') to null, it means that the character that is returned by the function is a new one and should be taken into the checkchar function.

if the char value is equal(usedcharacter(...) == '\0') to null, that means that the user has entered the character that you passed in to check before, hence you should tell him that "Oops! you tried this letter before. Please enter another letter."