I refer to the process of converting special characters into strings as tokenizing. The token is a character or string — a code. This code is translated into something else, which allows the program to deal with complex items in a simple manner.
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Unless the code must run endlessly, such as a program that operates a gas pump, an endless loop isn’t something you want. From last week’s Lesson, I crafted an endless loop to accept single-word input from the scanf() function to build a string. But no string is output because the loop never ends! It’s time to address this situation.
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Trying to salve my frustration with the scanf() function, I decided in last week’s Lesson to try to use scanf() to build a string. Because the function terminates standard input at the first whitespace character (space, tab, newline), the strings input must be stored and the string built in memory.
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The challenge for this month’s Exercise is to tally the digits in an integer, reporting the sum. You must use math and not cheat by looking at the old solution, which I didn’t. Promise.
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The scanf() function is useful for teaching, but it’s a booger. I avoid it outside of demonstration purposes. But it does provide good fodder for training beginning programmers to think about stream I/O.
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Seven years ago (to this same date!) I wrote an Exercise to tally the digits in a number. The solution required that the sum be reduced to a single digit. For example, the sum of digits in 12345 is 15, which is then reduced to six.
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Yes, this Exercise has been done before. But back then, exactly seven years ago, I had the digits reduced further so that the result was a single digit. This time, your goal is to tally the digits in an integer and report the results — no reductions!
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The power of an associative array is that it uses keys, text or numbers, to reference values. Know the key and you can fetch the value . This “association” works like an array in C, where you know the index or offset for an element. Though with an associative array, the index is a value or string — the key.
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The first phony associative array function I need to write is a simple dump: Output the array’s contents in the form of pairs. Performing this operation requires a bit of manipulation to the way the array is presented in the code.
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Being the ancient and venerable programming language it is, C lacks the associative array data type. This type of array is found in other languages, and it can be awkwardly simulated in C.
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