Question

I’m iterating through an array of chars to do some manipulation. I want to “skip” an iteration if there are two adjacent characters that are the same.

e.g. x112abbca
skip———-^

I have some code but it’s not elegant and was wondering if anyone can think of a better way? I have a few case‘s in the switch statement and would be happy if I didn’t have to use an if statement inside the switch.

switch(ent->d_name[i])
{
            if(i > 0 && ent->d_name[i] == ent->d_name[i-1])
                continue;
            case ' ' :
            ...//code omited
            case '-' :
            ...
}

By the way, an instructor once told me “avoid continues unless much code is required to replace them”. Does anyone second that? (Actually he said the same about breaks)

Answer 1

Put the if outside the switch.

While I don’t have anything against using continue and break, you can certainly bypass them this time without much code at all: simply revert the condition and put the whole switch statement within the if-block.

Answering the rectified question: what’s clean depends on many factors. How long is this list of characters to consider: should you iterate over them yourself, or perhaps use a utility function from <algorithm>? In any case, if you are referring to the same character multiple times, perhaps you ought to give it an alias:

std::string interesting_chars("-_;,.abc");

// ...
for (i...) {
  char cur = abc->def[i];
  if (cur != prev || interesting_chars.find(cur) == std::string::npos)
      switch (current) // ...