The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition, by Kernighan and Ritchie
Exercise 5.03 on page 107
Write a pointer version of the function strcat that we showed in Chapter 2: strcat(s,t) copies the string t to the end of s .
Solution by Richard Heathfield
/* ex 5-3, p107 */ #include <stdio.h> void strcpy(char *s, char *t) { while(*s++ = *t++); } void strcat(char *s, char *t) { while(*s) { ++s; } strcpy(s, t); } int main(void) { char testbuff[128]; char *test[] = { "", "1", "12", "123", "1234" }; size_t numtests = sizeof test / sizeof test[0]; size_t thistest; size_t inner; for(thistest = 0; thistest < numtests; thistest++) { for(inner = 0; inner < numtests; inner++) { strcpy(testbuff, test[thistest]); strcat(testbuff, test[inner]); printf("[%s] + [%s] = [%s]\n", test[thistest], test[inner], testbuff); } } return 0; }
Give nineteen programmers a spec, and you'll get at least twenty completely different programs.
As a tiny example of this, here's a totally different solution, by Bryan Williams.
/* Exercise 5-3. Write a pointer version of the function strcat that we showed in Chapter 2: strcat(s,t) copies the string t to the end of s. implementation from chapter 2: / * strcat: concatenate t to end of s; s must be big enough * / void strcat(char s[], char t[]) { int i, j; i = j = 0; while (s[i] != '\0') / * find end of s * / i++; while ((s[i++] = t[j++]) != '\0') / * copy t * / ; } Author : Bryan Williams */ /* strcat: concatenate t to end of s; s must be big enough; pointer version */ void strcat(char *s, char *t) { /* run through the destination string until we point at the terminating '\0' */ while('\0' != *s) { ++s; } /* now copy until we run out of string to copy */ while('\0' != (*s = *t)) { ++s; ++t; } } #define DRIVER 6 #if DRIVER #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { char S1[8192] = "String One"; char S2[8192] = "String Two"; printf("String one is (%s)\n", S1); printf("String two is (%s)\n", S2); strcat(S1, S2); printf("The combined string is (%s)\n", S1); return 0; } #endif
Category 0 Solution by Jesus Alvarez (Nearly identical to the answer above, but compact.)
#include <stdio.h> #define STR_BUFFER 10000 void strcat(char *, char *); int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { char string1[STR_BUFFER] = "What A "; char string2[STR_BUFFER] = "Wonderful World!"; printf ("String 1: %s\n", string1); strcat(string1, string2); printf ("String 2: %s\n", string2); printf ("Cat Result: %s\n", string1); return 0; } /* Concatenate t to s. */ void strcat(char *s, char *t) { /* * '*++s' is used to reference the pointer before incremmenting it so * that the check for falsehood ('\0') is done with the next character * instead of '*s++' which would check, then increment. Using '*s++' * would increment the pointer to the base string past the null * termination character. When outputting the string, this made it * appear that no concatenation occurred because the base string is * cut off by the null termination character ('\0') that was never * copied over. */ while(*++s); /* Get to the end of the string */ while((*s++ = *t++)); }










