Question

I am new to stackoverflow as am new to programming, yet am not really a ‘professional and enthusiast programmer’. Enthusiast maybe but not professional…

In a part of some beginner code of mine i have a two dimensional array diff[i][j], where the value is zero wherever i==j. I am trying to get the smallest value in each row but not the zero value…

the part of the code (under construction) that searches the smallest of the first row is:

i=1;
double smallest;
for ( j=1 ; j<=n ; j++ )
{ 
     smallest = diff[i][j];

     if ( j!=i && diff[i][j] < smallest ) 
         smallest = diff[i][j];
}

printf("\n %lf\n", smallest);

however, the result is always the biggest number not the smallest. Anyone knows why??

P.S. I’d be thankful for any suggestion or comment of dealing with stackoverflow.com and the way i asked my question, since am new here… thank you in advance…

EDIT
after the answers below, i decided to make the i=1 a special case and make two separate functions for both cases… however, when i try to assign j to other variable i failed… in the previous code:

if (j!=i && diff[i][j]<smallest) {smallest=diff[i][j]; d=j}

declared d previously and everything… when i print d it prints a random number >maybe the memory location content… tried for debugging to assign an initial value – with the declaration – and when printing it came out the initial value… the point is i want d to hold the column where the smallest value is… how can i acheive that??

Answer 1

You never initialize smallest

i=1;
double smallest = diff[1][2]; // initialize it to a non-diagonal element in the column
for (j=1; j<=n; j++)
    if (j!=i && diff[i][j]<smallest){
        smallest=diff[i][j];
    }
printf("\n %lf\n", smallest);

EDIT:

You also seem to have { smallest= diff[i][j]; .. } in your code that overrides the value of smallest each iteration. I removed it in my answer.