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Asked: 2026-05-22T11:38:05+00:00

I’m trying to develop a program in C to convert a sparse matrix file

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I’m trying to develop a program in C to convert a sparse matrix file into a dense matrix. From what I’ve read, the best approach would be the use of linked lists but I have no experience with them and haven’t found a good online resource explaining the subject. I’m not looking for a quick solution but rather a website or text source that can explain how the process works so I can apply it to this project. What resources I have seen, suggest using three arrays to handle the values in the matrix (The row, column, and individual value) and two arrays for the vector (one for the row, the other for the column). Thanks!

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  1. Editorial Team

    The file format you’ve specified is for a dense matrix. A 10×10 matrix with 100 elements is dense. A sparse matrix has fewer than n*m elements and all “missing” elements are assumed to be 0. The point of doing it this way is so that matrices that are almost all zero (which happens in a lot of applications) will use less space. But using a sparse matrix format to store a dense matrix will use far more space than just a plain array.

    One common sparse matrix file format is called MatrixMarket and it looks very similar to what you described. The first line has three values, # of rows, # of columns, # of nonzero elements (called nnz). Then you have nnz lines of the actual elements in a triplet: (row #) (column #) (value)
    If your sparse matrix is in a similar format then you don’t need any sparse matrix in memory. Just scan the values and fill in your dense array directly.

    If you do want to have a sparse matrix in memory then there are several options for how to store it. Triplets is the easiest, and it’s just an in-memory version of the MatrixMarket file. 3 arrays, or 1 array of structs.
    The most common structure for linear algebra operations is Compressed Sparse Columns (CSC) or Compressed Sparse Rows (CSR). I’ll let you look that up, but if you want a C implementation to play with you should look at Tim Davis’ CSparse. This is also how MatLAB stores sparse matrices, Tim was one of the people who wrote that part of MatLAB.

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