strings as inputs to a function

[David W. Thorell]

I am trying to write a basic spell check function, one which has as
its parameters two strings arrays, one is an article from a file
source which needs to be checked for valid words, in this case the
word needs to be at least 2 characters long with no intervening
punctuation, numbers or other non-letters.
This word then needs to be lower case and then compared to the
dictionary input array. the end result being the printing out of all
the misspelled words in the article. All of this needs to be done with
few or no pointers.
Any suggestions out there?

[Mark McIntyre]

On Tue, 08 Jul 2003 22:42:47 -0400, in comp.lang.c , pete
<pf*****@mindsp ring.com> wrote:

All of this needs to be done with
few or no pointers."
thats a pretty much impossible assignment, if you're using strings. I
guess you could write it all in one function, but as soon as you pass
your string to another function, *presto*, you have a pointer/
The impresion that I get, is that the input file and the dictionary
are both just supposed to be text files, not arrays of pointers.

A text file is an array of pointers to chars, written to disk with
intervening whitespace.

--
Mark McIntyre
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[pete]

Mark McIntyre wrote:

On Tue, 08 Jul 2003 22:42:47 -0400, in comp.lang.c , pete
<pf*****@mindsp ring.com> wrote:

All of this needs to be done with
few or no pointers."
thats a pretty much impossible assignment, if you're using strings.

Why is it pretty much impossible?
I posted a solution over five hours ago.
I guess you could write it all in one function,
but as soon as you pass
your string to another function, *presto*, you have a pointer/

Between the parameters and the automatic variables,
the function has only three objects which are pointers.
I believe that satisfies the
"All of this needs to be done with few or no pointers."
specification.

Do you disaprove of my posted solution or have you not seen it?

--
pete

[Malcolm]

"pete" <pf*****@mindsp ring.com> wrote in message

Between the parameters and the automatic variables,
the function has only three objects which are pointers.
I believe that satisfies the
"All of this needs to be done with few or no pointers."
specification.
The problem is that we don't understand what your tutor is getting at. The C
language is built around pointers, and C programmers use them all the time
without thinking. Writing a C program using "few or no pointers" is a bit
like trying to write a pop song using "few or no electric guitars" - it can
be done but the result is very strange, and it seems a pointless exercise.

If your dictionary is small you can get away by passing the whole thing in
as one string and using strstr, however this isn't a natural way to approach
the problem.

You also of course need a function to extract words from your text file and
clean them up, getting rid of the punctuation.
Do you disaprove of my posted solution or have you not seen it?

I haven't tested it. The main problem is that it won't scale to a real
application.