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 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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A recent puzzle presented itself, one where I must extract a date based on a file’s name. The date is part of the name, but my code required I translate the date into a time_t value. It’s an awesome programming puzzle that involves many different tricks.
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The results of the 27th International Obfuscated C Code Contest were announced earlier this month. The code is amazing. It runs. It’s horrifyingly cryptic.
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Like all IDEs, Code::Blocks is effectively a front for the clang, minGW, or gcc compiler lurking somewhere under its skin. While you don’t use these command line tools directly, you can control their options and settings from within the IDE.
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The traditional C compiler is cc. Its GNU replacement in the Linux world is gcc. A better option is the LLVM clang compiler. As commands typed at a prompt, you control these compilers by setting command line options or switches.
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In last week’s Lesson, I covered how to obtain the number of elements in an array. This process is the first step to emulating the foreach keyword in the C language.
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C has three looping keywords: do, for, and while. These keywords construct a block of statements that repeat, hopefully but not necessarily with a terminating condition. Other programming languages offer additional looping keywords, including the popular and useful foreach.
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