The next time March 14 drops on a Saturday will be in 2037. Yes, I will be long retired by then. Or perhaps the C language will finally be retired. Who knows? Regardless, here’s another program that uses some obscure mathematical mumbo-jumbo to calculate the value of π.
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π Day 2026
It’s been a few years since I’ve had π day here on the C blog. Because I schedule posts for Saturdays, only thrice has a post fallen on π day: In 2015, 2020, and now in 2026.
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What is the Largest Value – Solution
Once again, the challenge for this month’s exercise is to unravel a math puzzle. This time, the puzzle reads like this:
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The Final Task for Mousing Around

I promise that this is the final post dealing with reading a mouse in a terminal window. It’s a weird thing to do without a specific library in C, but made possible thanks to ANSI codes and the standard I/O programming necessary to read and store the data.
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What is the Largest Value?
Difficulty: ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Of all the crazy stuff that happens in the realm of mathematics, I’m certain that mathematicians must enjoy solving math puzzles — just like I assume that good programmers enjoy solving programming puzzles.
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Accessing the Mouse in a Terminal Window

The point of reading and capturing mouse data is to do something at the mouse’s location. Specifically, the goal is to have the terminal somehow react to a mouse click. Yes, even though C is stream oriented and rarely involves graphics or the mouse, this feat is made possible thanks to ANSI commands.
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Storing and Interpreting Mouse Input

Spewing data all over the screen might look impressive, as shown in last week’s Lesson, but the point of knowing where the mouse is and what it’s doing is to capture its data and make it available to your program for interpretation.
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Where is the Mouse?

Monitoring the mouse in a terminal window happens thanks to various ANSI commands. Last week’s Lesson demonstrated how mouse clicks are detected. By issuing another ANSI command, the mouse’s location data is obtained, but doing so carelessly can create a horrid mess.
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Pulling Numbers from a String – Solution
This month’s C programming exercise is to extract numbers from a string. Specifically, your task is to code the extract() function that returns the address of a digit found in a string. This function must also be capable of repeat calls to continue locating digits within the same string.
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What is the Mouse Doing?

Continuing from last week’s Lesson, once activated and configured, the output that mouse activity generates in a terminal window looks something like this:
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