The C language is weak when it comes to strings. Even the paltry assortment of string.h manipulation functions lacks quite a few tricks that are readily available to other languages. Among them is a function to reverse a string. So why not code your own?
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Generating a table where the items march left-to-right and then down the page is uncomplicated with stream output. What’s more difficult is outputting a table where the data drops in columns top-down before going left-to-right. Performing this feat requires no screen/cursor manipulation, only clever coding.
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This month’s Exercise searched for and output the first 100 cyclops numbers. But instead of spewing them out in a long column, my solution set them in a table. The values marched across the screen in neat rows. This trick is rather easy to accomplish, but in my solution I wanted some flexibility with the column number.
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I hope this month’s Exercise didn’t terrify you. I remember seeing The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad when I was a kid. The cyclops bothered me so much I asked my mom questions about him for a month.
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In a post from 2020, I wrote about various integer size values. Seems they don’t consistently sport the same bit width. Just recently, I’ve obtained some updated information and valuable insight into the bit width question.
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Oh, leave it to the propeller heads to devise a clever and fun name for something the rest of us never pay attention to. This time it’s a cyclops number, which is any decimal integer value with an odd number of digits and a big fat zero in the middle — like a cyclops’ eye.
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Occasionally the Wizards of C concoct a mad method to perform some magical feat on a number. This sorcery cannot be explained using those scant, basic math concepts known to me. So perhaps you’d like to invest a few moments to review what I consider to be one of the most insane ways to discover the maximum power of two that can divide any integer.
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I am not a math genius, as any math genius who reviews my work is happy to tell me. Even so, when programming I’m often faced with math challenges where a math education would benefit. My most recent puzzle is how to count the number of digits in a value without first converting the value into a string.
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I saw this problem on stackoverflow: How can you take a month string and convert it into an integer value, one through 12? The student submitting the query used a long if-else if-else construction. I have a better idea.
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I don’t believe one definitive solution exists for this month’s Exercise: Output a string of upper- and lowercase letters. No, the challenge is more to discover different insights a coder has to a specific problem.
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