At the end of the main() function, a return statement must surrender an integer value to the operating system. Does a higher value please the OS? Is it offended by zero? What exactly happens with the value returned when your program is done?
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I screwed up some code in a most delightful manner, all without knowing what I did. In fact, it was a student who ran my less-than-brilliant code and discovered the obvious flaw. But I was clueless.
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The strcasecmp() function isn’t part of the standard C library, though many compilers feature it. As having the function is handy, I wrote about crafting your own version back in 2019. Alas, that implementation is flawed.
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Any mortal programmer would have stopped with last week’s Lesson, where a tally of unique and duplicate words is output. This is the desired result, right? Yes, but it’s an un-orderly list.
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The next step in the unique words program is to tally the count of each word. From last week’s Lesson, the word list is sorted, which makes the task of counting duplicates easy.
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In our last episode, the unique words code is able to parse and list individual words in the buffer. To find unique and duplicate words, the next step is to sort the list.
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From last week’s Lesson, the text in a buffer is parsed, creating pointers to each word in the string. Alas, the addresses of these words (the pointers) aren’t saved, which is stupid. To handle the job, and to keep the Unique Words project moving forward, a dynamic array of pointers must be allocated.
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Continuing with my Unique Words project from last week’s Lesson: Once the buffer contains text, the next step is to parse the words: to split the long string of text stored in memory into separate word chunks. For this task, I turn to my old pall, the strtok() function.
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It’s easy for a good C programmer to code a program to tally the number of unique words in a chunk of text. Further, the computer could track repeating words. This task would drive a human nuts, but a computer? No problem.
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I’ve dabbled on the topic of parsing words from a string several times on this blog: Slicing Words from a String, Parse and Count Words in a String, and more. I just can’t have enough! In fact, this Lesson picks up the topic again, continuing my discussion of the strspn() and strcspn() functions from last week’s Lesson.
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