Question

I am learning C language and I am facing a problem I don’t seem to be able to resolve on my own.
I have a simple loop where I add up ascii values of all characters in each word.

    char char_array[100];
    int lexicographical_values[20];
    int i, j = 0;
    for( i = 0; i <strlen(char_array); i++) {
          if(char_array[i] == ' ') 
              j++;
          lexicographical_values[j] += (int)char_array[i];   
    }

Then, if I output the lexicographical_values array in a loop

  printf("%d word is: %d \n", i, lexicographical_values[i]);

I get correct figures for each word (ex: dd = 200 and so on)

But if I actually look at each element’s value in the array, I get big numbers that are far from being correct.

The question is, how do I get correct values and how does printf obtain the correct values?

Thanks

Answer 1

You have not initialized the lexicographical_values array. You can initialize it by doing:

int lexicographical_values[20] = {};

Every time you see big numbers in the output, check for uninitialized variables.