R1D25 The C Programming Language
I realize I am kind of all over the map, but I learn best when I am doing 50 things at once. Ast least that is what I tell myself. It could also be the reason why I am a master of none. :)
I’ve struggled to get through K&R for a while. I figured I could spend the next few days of 100 days of code to make my way through this book before making my way back to the C# course which was starting to make my head hurt a little bit.
Of course, this turned out to not be the best idea because I spent way too much time trying to solve a seemingly very simple problem in C. It’s a problem I’ve gotten stuck on several times as I have made my way through this book in the past.
The problem is:
Write a program to copy its input to its output, replacing each string of one or more blanks by a single blank.This seems stupidly simple. But I can't seem to figure it out, and I refuse to google for the solution just yet.
I tried an approach using getchar() and putchar() but my output either contains no spaces, a jumble of words, or something else. I’ll take another crack at this tomorrow and might resort to either pulling out gdb to step through my stupidly simple code, or go figure out the internals of how getchar() and putchar() work in the standard library.
By the end of this, I will know more about these two functions than I ever wanted to.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Setting up ANTLR4 on Windows
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Ten Years of Dreaming of San Francisco
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Fedora Magazine: Contribute to Fedora 44 KDE and GNOME Test Days from Fedora People
- Pluralistic: bunnie's piggyback hack (09 Jan 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Clicks Communicator from Chris Hannah
- A Year Of Vibes from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- Pluralistic: A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (18 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Moving from WordPress to Substack from charity.wtf
- Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Announcing Live AI & Design Systems Jam Sessions!
Ian, TJ, and I are excited to announce live AI & Design Systems Jam Sessions with our AI & Design Systems course community! Our first jam session will be Thursday, February 26 at 10AM ET. In these recurring biweekly Zoom […]
via Blog – Brad Frost February 16, 2026I Sold Out for $20 a Month and All I Got Was This Perfectly Generated Terraform
Until recently the LLM tools I’ve tried have been, to be frank, worthless. Copilot was best at writing extremely verbose comments. Gemini would turn a 200 line script into a 700 line collection of gibberish. It was easy for me to, more or less, ignore LLM…
via matduggan.com February 16, 2026Pluralistic: The online community trilemma (16 Feb 2026)
Today's links The online community trilemma: Reach, community and information, pick two. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bruces x Sony DRM; Eniac tell-all; HBO v PVRs; Fucking damselflies; Gil Scout Cookie wine-pairings; Bi…
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow February 16, 2026Generated by openring