Question

I’m looking at this program that reads input lines and then sorts them, from K&R.

And I can’t figure out why it doesn’t sort them correctly if I enter for example

1234532 first line
abc second line

It won’t sort them in increasing order. Basically it doesn’t work if the input lines contains numbers or something other then letters, I think.

But this works for lines with letters:

abc
abcsda

will get sorted correctly.

This is the code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

#define MAXLINES 5000

char *lineptr[MAXLINES];

int readlines(char *lineptr[], int nlines);
void writelines(char *lineptr[], int nlines);

void qsort(char *lineptr[], int left, int right);

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
     int nlines;

     if((nlines = readlines(lineptr, MAXLINES)) >= 0) {
          qsort(lineptr, 0, nlines-1);
          writelines(lineptr, nlines);
          system("PAUSE");
          return 0;
     } 
     else {
          printf("error: input too big to sort\n");
          return 1;
     }


  system("PAUSE");  
  return 0;
}


#define MAXLEN 1000
int getline(char *, int);
char *alloc(int);

int readlines(char *lineptr[], int maxlines)
{
    int len, nlines;
    char *p, line[MAXLEN];

    nlines = 0;
    while((len = getline(line, MAXLEN)) > 0)
       if(nlines >= maxlines || (p = alloc(len)) == NULL)
          return -1;
       else {
            line[len-1] = '\0';
            strcpy(p, line);
            lineptr[nlines++] = p;
       }
    return nlines;
}

void writelines(char *lineptr[], int nlines)
{
     while(nlines -- > 0)
         printf("%s\n", *lineptr++);
}

int getline(char s[], int lim)
{
  int c, i;

  for (i = 0; i < lim - 1 && (c = getchar()) != EOF && c != '\n'; i++)
    s[i] = c;                                                         
  if (c == '\n') {
    s[i++] = c;   
  }
  s[i] = '\0';
  return i;
}

#define ALLOCSIZE 10000

static char allocbuf[ALLOCSIZE];
static char *allocp = allocbuf;

char *alloc(int n)
{
     if(allocbuf + ALLOCSIZE - allocp >= n) {
          allocp +=n;
          return allocp - n;
     }
     else 
          return 0;
}

void swap(char *v[], int i, int j)
{
     char *temp;

     temp = v[i];
     v[i] = v[j];
     v[j] = temp;
}

void qsort(char *v[], int left, int right) {

    int i, last;

    if(left >= right) 
       return;

    swap(v, left, (left+right)/2);
    last = left;

    for(i = left + 1; i <= right; i++)
      if(strcmp(v[i], v[left]) < 0)
         swap(v, ++last, i);

    swap(v, left, last);
    qsort(v, left, last-1);
    qsort(v, last+1, right);
}

Answer 1

It is sorting them correctly. Numbers sort before letters in ASCII. What output are you expecting?