Book Image

Learn C Programming. - Second Edition

By : Jeff Szuhay
Book Image

Learn C Programming. - Second Edition

By: Jeff Szuhay

Overview of this book

The foundation for many modern programming languages such as C++, C#, JavaScript, and Go, C is widely used as a system programming language as well as for embedded systems and high-performance computing. With this book, you'll be able to get up to speed with C in no time. The book takes you through basic programming concepts and shows you how to implement them in the C programming language. Throughout the book, you’ll create and run programs that demonstrate essential C concepts, such as program structure with functions, control structures such as loops and conditional statements, and complex data structures. As you make progress, you’ll get to grips with in-code documentation, testing, and validation methods. This new edition expands upon the use of enumerations, arrays, and additional C features, and provides two working programs based on the code used in the book. What's more, this book uses the method of intentional failure, where you'll develop a working program and then purposely break it to see what happens, thereby learning how to recognize possible mistakes when they happen. By the end of this C programming book, you’ll have developed basic programming skills in C that can be easily applied to other programming languages and have gained a solid foundation for you to build on as a programmer.
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
1
Part 1: C Fundamentals
10
Part 2: Complex Data Types
19
Part 3: Memory Manipulation
22
Part 4: Input and Output
28
Part 5: Building Blocks for Larger Programs

Creating a file of unsorted names

Now that we have getoptFiles.c, we can use it as a starting point for our next sequential file program, createUnsorted.c. This program will be used to create a file of names, one name on a line, that will later become input to the sortNames.c program. 

In createUnsorted.c, we will repeatedly read in a single name and write it out. We can test the functionality of this program by using stdin and stdout as well as reading and writing files.

However, before we can go further, we need to consider the issue of dirty input data. We can assume that a name begins with alphanumeric characters and ends with alphanumeric characters; we will assume that anything in between is part of the name, however odd it may appear. What happens if the user enters whitespace either before or after the name? Or if there is whitespace both before and after the name? Recall also that fgets() ends its input...