Ever just need a second set of eyes to help?

For some reason I decided to go back to school to get my degree in this stuff... I am taking a programming in c class and have been assigned a task to 1) load a string with user promt, 2) allow user to select to count the occurence of each letter in the string regardless if upper or lower case... or select to reverse the word order from end to finish... words separated by tab or space.

I got the first part down no problem... when it comes to reading the string backward, looking for the first space or tab, then printing forward till last end or end of string, has got me stuck something terrible.. I have tried about 20 different ways to do it - and nothing seems to work just right...

here is what I have... I need help with case 2 below...

Code:

---

/*
Code by GoZippy
This program reads in a user string, allows user to count occurance of each letter in string, display the string words in reverse order or quit. */

#include <stdio.h>                            /* Include standard IO library */
#include <string.h>                            /* Include stringh library */
#define STR_LEN 100                            /* DEFINE String Length variable to 100 */


int main (void)                                /* Declare and intialize variables */
{
  char string[STR_LEN+1];                        /* Declare char string array " string " */
  int length;                            /* Declare and init length variable type integer */
  int menu;                                /* Menu varuable user input choice type integer */
  int i = 0;                            /* default generic loop position counter */
  int j = 0;                                /* second generic loop position counter*/
  int count[26] = {0};                            /* count array for alpha count */
  int pluscount = 0;                            /* forward count of word characters dilimited by tab or space                                            variable */
  int begin = 0;
  int end = 0;

  printf("Enter a text message: ");                    /* Prompt for text message*/
    for (i=0; i<STR_LEN; i++)
      {
        scanf("%c", &string[i]);
        if (string[i] == '\n')
          {
            length = i;
            i = 0;
            break;
          }
      }
begin = length;
end = length;

                                /*Prompt for Menu Choices */
  printf("Available choices:\n");
  printf("  1. Display number of ocurrences of each letter\n");
  printf("  2. Print words in reverse order\n");
  printf("  3. Quit\n");
  printf("Enter the number of your choice: ");
    scanf("%i",&menu);

    switch(menu)
      {
        case 1:                            /* display ocurrence of each letter */
        j = 0;                            /* reset generic counter j to position 0 */
        while ( string[j] !='\0' && j <= length )        /* loop through string array positions */
          {
            if ( string[j] >= 'a' && string [j] <= 'z' )    /* if i is lowercase letter */
                count[string[j]-'a']++;            /* get value for i, subtract 'a' then incriment corresponding count                                            array letter position 0-26 */
            else if ( string[j] >= 'A' && string[j] <= 'Z' )/* if i is upper case letter, subtract A then incriment                                        corresponding count array letter position */
                count[string[j]-'A']++;
            /*else
                printf("\n");
                printf("There was an error with the input - CODE 101 \n"); */
            j++;
          }
        for (i=0;i<26;i++)
          {
            if (count[i] != 0)
              {
                printf("%c: %d \n",i+'a',count[i]);
              }
          }
        break;
        case 2: /* print words in reverse order */
        for ( pluscount = 0, i = (strlen(string)-1); i >= 0; i--)
          {
            if ( (string[i] ==' ') || (string[i]=='\t') )
              {
                    i++;
                    pluscount++;
                    while ((string[i] != ' ') && (string[i] !='\t') && (string[i] != '\n') && (string[i] != '\0') )
                      {
                          printf("%c", string[i]);
                          i++;
                          pluscount++;
                      }
                    i = (i-pluscount);
              }       
           
            else if(i == 0)
              {
                begin = i;
                for (j=begin; j<=end && (string[j] != ' ')
                    && (string[j] != '\t')
                    && (string[j] != '\n')
                    && (string[j] != '\0'); j++)
                  {       
                    printf("%c",string[j]);
                }
                end = i;
                printf("\n");
                  break;
              }

          }
           
   
        case 3: /* quit - break from case and terminate */
       
        break;
      }
return 0;
}

---

for instance - with user input
This is a String

it should print

String a is This

....
...
I do not want to use pointers in this just yet - this is supposed to be basic but I am missing something...

When going backward through the string, you will find the end of each substring first and then need keep going until you find its beginning. Once you have the beginning and end, simply print everything between the identified beginning and end. Then remember to add a space after printing each substring (your code doesn't appear to be doing that).


You can probably simplify your code a lot by making use of functions from the standard library. The standard header <ctype.h> specifies functions like isalpha() to test is a character is a letter, islower() to check for lower case, isupper() to check for upper case, isspace() to check for whitespace (space, tab, newlines, etc), and a bunch of other things.


One thing to watch with your code is that, when reading, you are not adding a zero terminator to the string. That means subsequent code cannot assume it will find a zero terminator. strlen() searches for a zero terminator, and gives undefined behaviour (walking over all memory until it finds a character with value zero) if one is not there. You're probably getting by on that because your compiler is initialising string to zero - problem is, compilers are NOT required to do that.