distributedlife

I was going to talk about disciplines in software testing but my netbook isn’t connecting to the network and consequently I can’t get the post off. Still I had this one scheduled for the weekend. It’s about strings in old languages like Latin. I’ll retype the other one or fix the network. Till tomorrow!

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Implementing the trim function barely gets a mention in languages these days because having to implemented it in a new language is stoopid. However C is old and grizzled.

This version stores the result in a HP Paramater for use outside the function. You could return it if you wanted. If you did you would need to remove the free statement.

void Trim (const char* Bloated, const char* Parameter)
{
    long BloatedLength = strlen (Bloated) ;

    char* Trimmed = 0 ;
    long TrimmedLength = 0 ;

    long TrimFromStart = strspn (Bloated, " \t") ;
    long TrimFromEnd = 0 ;

    long index = 0 ;

We need to calculate the number of characters that are white space at the end of the string. This ignores new line characters.

    //Count Trailing whitespace
    index = BloatedLength - 1 ;
    while ( (Bloated[index] == ' ') || (Bloated[index] == '\t'))
    {
        TrimFromEnd++ ;

        if (index == 0)
        {
            break ;
        }

        index-- ;
    }

    TrimmedLength = BloatedLength - TrimFromEnd - TrimFromStart ;
    TrimmedLength++ ; //space for null terminating

    Trimmed = (char*) malloc (TrimmedLength * sizeof(char)) ;
    if (!Trimmed)
    {
        lr_error_message("Failed to allocate memory for the trimmed string") ;

        return ;
    }

Our actual trim is nothing more than memcpy so you could write a substring function and do it that way.

    //"trim"
    memcpy (Trimmed, Bloated + TrimFromStart, TrimmedLength) ;

    //set null terminating char
    Trimmed[TrimmedLength - 1] = '\0' ;

    lr_set (Trimmed, Parameter);

    free (Trimmed) ;
}