The C programming language doesn’t sport the thousands of functions (or methods or what-have-you) available in Java. They say Java programmers may never use or even know the variety. With many fewer functions available in the standard C library, I would think to know them all. Then along comes another one I’ve neither used nor heard of. This week’s Lesson covers such as function, strfmon().
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Many moons ago, I wrote about the non-standard function, strcasecmp(). It works like the C library function strcmp(), though it ignores character case. Turns out my return value from the function isn’t exactly correct.
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Your challenge for this month’s Exercise is to write a sign() function, which returns 1, 0, or -1 depending on the sign of an integer. A relatively simple thing to code — I hope!
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The 16-hour puzzle presented in last week’s Lesson has been resolved: It was actually a 24-hour puzzle, minus 8 hours for my time zone, which equals 16 hours. But what can be done about the time zone difference?
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The strcmp() function returns a value based on the comparison of two strings. The value is zero when the strings match, otherwise the value is positive or negative depending on how the strings compare. This result makes me wonder which other functions can return positive, negative, or zero values and whether the C library has a sign() function or similar that helps make such a determination.
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In last week’s Lesson, I covered the mechanics behind manually calculating a time_t value. My code was successful, but in a curious way.
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Ho boy! This time_t project turned out to be a lot more complex than I thought it would be!
The problem: Count the number of seconds elapsed from January 1, 1970 to a given year, month, and day. This task is easy for a computer, but not that easy to code if you want to get the value correct.
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Pulling a date from a string involves slicing the string into substrings, which are then converted into values for year, month, and day. Last week’s Lesson demonstrated such code. This week, the final step is accomplished, converting year, month, and day integers into a time_t value.
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The challenge for this month’s Exercise is to initialize two different arrays to two sets of values. You should try to use only one loop and try to use a single statement to make the element assignments.
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The goal stated in last week’s Lesson is to convert a date formatted in a filename string into a time_t value. The filename string must be scanned for expected year, month, and date values. This process involves a custom function, convert(), as well as the strtol() function to translate strings of digits into long int values.
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