Question

I am having trouble turning strings to uppercase for an alphabetical sort. My program actually begins to slow down and freeze after the third set of words. What am I doing wrong?

string iName = list[i]->GetLastName(); // This just returns a string of a name
string jName = list[j]->GetLastName();

for(unsigned int k = 0; k < iName.length(); k++)
  {
    iName[k] = toupper(iName[k]);
  }

for(unsigned int l = 0; l < jName.length(); l++)
  {
    iName[l] = toupper(jName[l]);
  }

Answer 1

as others said, you mixed iname and jname…. and why did you do this?

Because you copy pasted!

So, a good early lesson in programming is to try and avoid copy paste! instead try and create functions…..

in your case…

void stringToUpper(string &s)
{
   for(unsigned int l = 0; l < s.length(); l++)
  {
    s[l] = toupper(s[l]);
  }
}

then you can do

stringToUpper(iName);
stringToUpper(jName);

This approach redues a LOT of errors related to copy pasting and in general, helps make your programs a lot more modular