Unless your program also created the file it’s reading, you have no guarantee how must text lurks inside. It could be a single character or the entire works of Shakespeare. Dealing with an unknown quantity of text it a file-reading challenge.
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Sending text to standard output is something you learn with your first C program. The common functions are putchar(), puts(), printf(), and so on. When you explore file access, you’ll find familiarity in those functions because they’re quite similar to the standard I/O functions.
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The solution for this month’s Exercise is perhaps a bit trickier than you may have anticipated. The issue is to set the first letter of a word as upper case and the remaining letters lowercase. The solution I devised involves reading two characters at a time.
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I had such a struggle with file I/O when I first learned computer programming. I knew what a file was and how to create it in an application. With computer programming, however, you enter a lower-level realm that requires more knowledge of file access.
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A filter is a program that accepts standard input and generates standard output. These programs are fun to write, providing you have a goal in mind and some way to manipulate the incoming text in a manner that’s significant enough to notice in the output.
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Your probably familiar with the #include and #define preprocessor directives. You may know a few more, which come in handy for certain coding issues. I have a page on this blog, which goes over some of the common directives, but it doesn’t cover them all. Specifically, it doesn’t cover the preprocessor names.
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The code to recursively plow a directory tree presented in last week’s Lesson could be improved upon. Primarily, it relies upon the .. shortcut to jump back to the parent directory. This method works only some of the time.
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Exploring a folder tree — I mean directory tree — is a procedure found in many file and media utilities. From an original directory, you scan the list of files looking for a subdirectory. When it’s found, you open it and recursively continue the scan.
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O how well I remember DOS. It wasn’t Unix, but it cribbed from Unix heavily. One of the popular DOS commands was DIR, which was like the shell command ls, but more primitive. A typical DOS directory listing looked something like this:
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The solution to this month’s Exercise is similar to code I’ve presented in my books and in this blog with regards to randomly drawing from a fixed set of elements. Yet it has an extra level of complexity.
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