Lev Lazinskiy

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.

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.