A question from my data sturture project

[kant]

I have this input file that contain words. I am suppose to scan this text, and save each word into a some data structure( not part of my question). My question is: How do i get the words but ignore the symbols? The text that is given contain symbols like - , : ; ( ) _ - + - ...etc. Here is what i got so far:

while( scanf(fpname, %s, stun) !=EOF) )
{
******
****
***
pname= AllocateName( stun);
*******
*****
***
*

}
/* here is my allocate name fuction*/

char* AllocateName( char *stun)
{
char*name;
char let;
int num;
num= strlen(stun);
--num;
let=stun[num];
if(let=='.' ||let==',' || let==':')
{
stun[num]='\o';
}
if(!(name=(char*)malloc( strlen(stun)+1, sizeof(char))))
{
printf("problem allocating name\n");
exit(2);
}
strcmp(name, stun);

return name;
}

Yes, yes.. It only care for words that ends with a comma, or a period.
So it is a not a perfect solution. There can be words like:

(log)(base4)(12) <-- consider one word

but not this:

I have the utter-most-hatred-this-lab, where "utter", "most", "hatred", "this" , "lab" are consider individual words, without the god damn '-'. In other word, if i save "utter-most-hatred-this-lab" as a string as stun, than it must be borken up into some unknown number of pieces individually allocate in the heap! unless i am to use [^!@#$%^&*()]. What is a alogant way to god damn do this??

 

[Hurkyl]

Well, to be elegant you have to first stop swearing.

Do you know the strpbrk function? Or strcspn? There's also strtok, but it has issues.

There's a whole slew of useful string manipulation routines -- you should find a chapter in a book on them and just read it, or scan through all the manpages for them (they usually contain references to each other) to learn what they all do.

You can even do a google search for "man strpbrk"


But, the whole lesson is: string parsing is not elegant. Deal with it.

 

[ravenprp]

To ignore symbols and break up words that contain symbols, you can use the strtok() function in C. This function allows you to specify a set of delimiter characters, in this case symbols, and it will break up a string into smaller strings based on those delimiters. For example, you can use the symbols listed in the input file as delimiters and strtok() will break up words like "utter-most-hatred-this-lab" into individual words without the symbols. You can then save these individual words into your data structure. Here is an example of how you can use strtok() in your code:

while (scanf(fpname, "%s", stun) != EOF) {
char *token = strtok(stun, "-,.;:()_+- ");
while (token != NULL) {
// save token into your data structure
token = strtok(NULL, "-,.;:()_+- ");
}
}

This code will break up the input string "utter-most-hatred-this-lab" into "utter", "most", "hatred", "this", and "lab" and save each of them individually into your data structure. You can also add other symbols to the delimiter list as needed.