Here’s a scary thing for most people: **blorf. No, not the name blorf, although it’s one of my favorite made-up words. What drives programmers insane — and all programmers, not just C programmers — are those double disaster asterisks.
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It’s all come to this: Gathering up the individual functions necessary to code a program that outputs the current month, formatted, with the proper number of days for February. Coincidentally, this post is published in February.
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Centering text is one of those basic things many programmer’s have to deal with. Yet once you write the function, you might forget about something I called bounds checking. After all, who would ever pass a string to a centering function where that string would be wider than the field in which it’s centered?
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Last week’s Lesson demonstrates a pretty decent calendar program. It works for every month of the year that has 31 days. Obviously that’s not every month, so more fine tuning must be done, especially to deal with the variable number of days in February.
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With an algorithm that properly returns the first day of the month, the next step in creating a calendar is to display that first week, and then all subsequent weeks. Sounds easy, right?
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To create a calendar, you start with the first day of the month. Knowing which weekday is the first of the month is vital to your success.
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Unix features a handy command line tool called cal. When typed by its lonesome, cal spits up a text calendar on the terminal window. Or you can follow cal with a month and year value to see a specific month, or just the year value to see a year’s calendar. It’s nifty!
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It’s not the first thing you think of when you design output. No, it’s one of those afterthoughts, those numerous, “Hey, I could do this” moments that programmers experience time and again. In this case, the concept is centering a chunk of text.
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I can think of three rules for concocting your own string in the C language.
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Text stored on a computer consists of various displayable characters and perhaps some control codes, such as a tab (\t) or the newline (\n). The string has a starting point, but determining where and how the string ends differs depending on what is storing or reading the string.
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