Question

I’m looking for a way to iterate over each word within a string gathered from the getchar() function in C. I can’t use pointers. Each word in the sentence will have something done to it but should not be affected by the other words and I need a way to access the letters, such as even if I’m at the third word, buffer[k] if k = 0 would give the first letter of the third word.

void read_line (char buffer[])
{
    char character;
    int i = 0;

    for (i = 0; i < 32; ++i)
    {
        character = getchar ();
        buffer[i] = character;
    }
}

Answer 1

Normally you would use strchr to find a space in the string, but since you can’t use pointers:

void read_line (char buffer[]) 
{ 
    char character; 
    int i = 0; 

    for (i = 0; i < 32; ++i) 
    { 
        character = getchar (); 

        if (character == '\n')
            break;

        buffer[i] = character; 
    } 

    i = 0;

    while (buffer[i] != '\n')
    {
        for (; buffer[i] != ' '; ++i)
            // each iteration of this loop will be on the same word

        ++i;
    }
}