Question

I have a string and I want to remove all the punctuation from the beginning and the end of it only, but not the middle.

I have wrote a code to remove the punctuation from the first and last character of a string only, which is clearly very inefficient and useless if a string has 2 or more punctuations at the end.

Here is an example:

{ Hello ""I am:: a Str-ing!! }

Desired output

{ Hello I am a Str-ing }

Are there any functions that I could use? Thanks.

This is what I’ve done so far. I’m actually editing the string in a linked-list

if(ispunct(removeend->string[(strlen(removeend->string))-1]) != 0) { 
    removeend->string[(strlen(removeend->string))-1] = '\0'; 
} 
else {} 

Answer 1

char *rm_punct(char *str) {
  char *h = str;
  char *t = str + strlen(str) - 1;
  while (ispunct(*p)) p++;
  while (ispunct(*t) && p < t) { *t = 0; t--; }
  /* also if you want to preserve the original address */
  { int i;
    for (i = 0; i <= t - p + 1; i++) {
      str[i] = p[i];
  } p = str; } /* --- */

  return p;
}