The brutal winter continues in my area, with no end in site! I saved weather data collected for 31 days from December to January in a CSV file. This file was used in last month’s Exercise. For this month’s Exercise, your job is to read the same data file, but also to report on the results.
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The standard library functions atoi() and atof() work well to translate text (ASCII) input into values, an int or float, respectively. When your code must know whether a string is really a value, more processing is required.
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My philosophy is to treat the input as a string until I can confirm that it’s not. The question then rises as to how strings can best translate into a value.
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In Part II of this series, I showed code that let you pass a pointer’s address to a function. Within that function, the address can be manipulated and value at that address displayed. Can the same thing be done with a two-dimensional array, which is loosely related to a ** pointer?
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This month’s Exercise, required you to read a CSV file, extract specific information, and output a table. It’s basically a file-reading exercise, though you must also translate the input into the proper value. And you must output the month as a string.
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Those programmers I wrote about in last week’s Lesson, the ones who avoid the ** pointer notation, usually do so by using a two-dimensional array instead of the ** pointer thing. It’s a quick substitute, but it’s not exactly the same thing.
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Of all the common file formats, the CSV is probably the oldest one still in use. It’s a plain text file, so the formatted data appears is readable by humans: Each line is a record. Each field is separated by a single comma.
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I know C programmers who make it their goal to avoid pointers — even where necessary. It’s possible to do so, and many have cheat sheets to help them. Then comes the ** pointer monster, which can be avoided altogether . . . until you need to manipulate a pointer variable’s own address within a function. Then you’re cursed.
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When a function must manipulate a pointer’s address, the argument passed is a pointer-pointer, not a pointer. Confused? Oh, I’m just getting started . . .
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It’s common to pass a pointer to a function. Within the function, you can manipulate the data the pointer references without having to return that data from the function. This aspect of a pointer is what makes C a powerful — and scary — programming language. But what about when you need to manipulate the pointer’s address in the function?
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