Removing characters from a string

I'm learning strings and I have to write a program that (along with other things) takes a singular form of a noun and makes it plural. More specifically, the one I'm working with now is if the noun is baby, it would drop the "y" and add an "ies".

The only part I have left to figure out is how to drop the "y" off the end of baby before using strcat to put "bab" and "ies" together to make it "babies".

Any ideas/tips?

Replace the y with the end of string character '\0'. Also make sure that the destination string for your strcat() call is large enough to hold this new string.

Jim

And how would you replace it with '\0'?
This is what I have and it seems right. I just don't know how to replace the y with '\0'.

Code:

---

if (strcmp(&string1[stringlength-1], "y")==0)
        {
                strcat(string1, "ies");
                printf("%s", string1);
        }

---

That business with the strcmp is needlessly complicated. You know a string is an array of characters, right? So why not simply

Code:

---

if( string1[stringlength-1]=='y' ) {
  replace string1[stringlength-1] with 'i';
  replace string1[stringlength] with 'e';
  replace string1[stringlength+1] with 's';
  replace string1[stringlength+2] with '\0';
}

---

?.

As long as string1 is large enough to hold the larger string.

Code:

---

if (string1[stringlength-1] == 'y')
        {
                string1[stringlength-1] = '\0';
                strcat(string1, "ies");
                printf("%s", string1);
        }

---

If string1 is not large enough for the new larger string you will have problems. In this case string1 must be defined as char string1[8] at the very minimum.

Jim

Quote:

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Originally Posted by laurenlb

I'm learning strings and I have to write a program that (along with other things) takes a singular form of a noun and makes it plural. More specifically, the one I'm working with now is if the noun is baby, it would drop the "y" and add an "ies".

The only part I have left to figure out is how to drop the "y" off the end of baby before using strcat to put "bab" and "ies" together to make it "babies".

Any ideas/tips?

---

You don't need to remove the y first... just overwrite it with the new data.

Code:

---

char text[100];
char *ptr;

strcpy(text,"Baby");

// find the y
ptr = strchar('y');
// change to plural
if (ptr)
  strcpy(ptr,"ies");

printf("%s", text);

---

strchr()
But what if the word contains other 'y's.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by nonoob

strchr()
But what if the word contains other 'y's.

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Good point.

I was concentrating on showing him how he didn't need to remove the last letter and overlooked that.

Thanks.