so you may have guessed from the title that this is Exercise 1-21 of K&R (2nd edition).

I’ve seen someone else’s post about it but it doesn’t solve the problem the way my code does, and I wasn’t sure whether I was allowed to post my code as an answer and ask for feedback (it just seemed better to create a new thread and ask for advice here, didn’t wanna pollute the other user’s topic but if that’s what I am supposed to do please let me know and I’ll reply over there).

In any way, here’s the approach I took to solve the problem:

Approach:

• We’ll keep track of number of spaces encountered (between nontab/nonspace characters)

• We’ll keep track of characters (that aren’t tabs/blanks/newlines) per input line

• We’ll evaluate the “gaps” generated by spaces by:

  • Evaluating whether the number of spaces in between those characters.

  • A gap will be “big enough” when the number of spaces is >= TABSIZE

  • Then, for all the left over spaces in our “buffer”, we’ll print them out individually

Finally, we print out the character that was read in (which was not a tab/blank)

As well as updating space count and character count if necessary.

Here’s the Gist on my Github profile, looking forward to hearing improvements to it!

Also, keep in mind that I am just revisiting C’s K&R and I am aware that some of it may be outdated, but I’m doing my best to use what’s still “useful” of the book and discard what may not be.

I’m using these notes to accompany my travels through C.

If anyone knows of any good resources such as the notes above, or has any feedback whatsoever on either the code/resources, please share it!