Delimit strings

[petrainc]

This is my first time posting and I am not a strong C programmer so here is my problem.

I am interfacing with a 3rd party software and the return from this app would be a space (or so I believe it is space) delimited string. I am having trouble replacing the "space" with a user defined delimiter.

example -

output string from 3rd party app:

name1 name2 name3

What I would like to do is to convert the spaces between each to whatever the user has defined so it may look like -

name1,name2,name3

I am using following code and it does not seem to work - special characters are being inserted into the string when I do the following -

for(i=0; i<strlen(buffer); i++) {
     if (buffer[i]==' ' && buffer[i-1] != ',') {
          tbuf[i]=',';
     }
     else 
          tbuf[i]=buffer[i];
}

Any ideas

[itsme86]

You should check if they really are spaces:

for(i = 0; buffer[i]; ++i)
  printf("%c (%d)\n", buffer[i], buffer[i]);

If you don't see 32 printed for the spaces then they're something else. And this should at least tell you what they are.

Also, doing evaluation strlen(buffer) each time through the loop is inefficient. Just look to see if the current character is the '\0' string terminator like I do in my loop.

You're also accessing an out-of-bounds array element in your loop. If i is 0 you shouldn't check the i - 1 element.

[Quantum1024]

Your question is similar to the eliminating spaces thread, Your output isn't being zero terminated.