Question

I’m inputting a string by using fgets, e.g. “Hello World”. I want to try and delete the white space inbetween the word, however what I am trying keeps returning hello@world (where @ is a random character).

void sortString(char phrase[])
{
    int i, j;
    char temp[200];


    for(i = 0; i < 200; i++)
    {
        if(!(isspace(phrase[i])))
        {
            temp[i] = phrase[i];
        }
    }

    printf("%s", temp);
}

So i’m basically copying the character[i] over from the phrase to a temp array if it isn’t a whitespace, but i’m unsure as to why i’m getting a random character instead of just, for example, helloworld.

Answer 1

Whenever you see a whitespace character in phrase, you are simply skipping over the equivalent location in temp, leaving it uninitialized (containing garbage). You need a separate counter to keep track of the current location in the temp array.

Also, you should check for the string in phrase terminating with a \0 character, rather than blindly copying all 200 characters, and make sure the temp string is safely terminated too.

Making sure temp[] is actually big enough for the resulting output is left as a further exercise. (Look in Gandaro’s answer for a clue.)

void sortString(char phrase[])
{
    int i, j;
    char temp[200];

    for(i = 0, j = 0; phrase[i] != '\0'; i++)
    {
        if(!(isspace(phrase[i])))
        {
            temp[j++] = phrase[i];
        }
    }

    temp[j] = '\0';
    printf("%s", temp);
}