How to Reverse a sentence word by word? - c

Question

I was trying to reverse a sentence word by word. (how are you -> you are how) First of all I create a char sentence and reverse and temp. Sentence given by user to reverse. Temp catches the word to change the location in the sentence.Then I use strcat to concatenate each word. Here is the problem. I can find the word which is end of the sent(takes input) but when I'm trying to concatenate to reverse, it add this word to sentence and an error occurs. What's the problem?
#define _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
char* subs(char* temp, char* src, int start, int end);
int main() {
char sent[15]; //input sentence
char rev[15]; // output sentence
char *temp=(char*)calloc(1,sizeof(char)); //for the word
scanf(" %[^\n]%*c", &sent); // takin' input
int i, end, start;
i = strlen(sent);
//find the beggining and ending of the indexes of the word in sentence
while (i > 0) {
while (sent[i] == ' ') {
i--;
}
end = i-1;
while (sent[i] != ' ') {
i--;
}
start = i + 1;
//add the word to temp and concatenate to reverse
temp=subs(temp, sent, start, end);
strncat(rev, temp,end-start+3);
}
rev[strlen(sent)] = '\0';
printf("%s", rev);
return 0;
}
char* subs(char* temp, char* src, int start, int end) {
int i = 0, control;
// resize the temp for the wırd
temp = (char*)realloc(temp,end-start+3);
for (; i < (end - start) + 1; i++) {
control = (start + i);
temp[i] = src[control];
}
//adding blank and null character to end of the word.
temp[i] = ' ';
temp[++i] = '\0';
return temp;
}

Answer 1

I will just copy my good answer from this question that was not yet closed Reverse a string without strtok in C
. So I can not use this reference to close your question as a duplicate.
A standard approach is to reverse each word within a string and then to reverse the whole string.
The standard C function strtok is not appropriate in this case. Instead use the standard C functions strspn and strcspn.
Here you are.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
static char * reverse( char *s, size_t n )
{
for ( size_t i = 0; i < n / 2; i++ )
{
char c = s[ i ];
s[ i ] = s[ n - i - 1 ];
s[ n - i - 1 ] = c;
}
return s;
}
char * reverse_by_words( char *s )
{
const char *delim = " \t";
char *p = s;
while ( *p )
{
p += strspn( p, delim );
if ( *p )
{
char *q = p;
p += strcspn( p, delim );
reverse( q, p - q );
}
}
return reverse( s, p - s );
}
int main(void)
{
char s[] = "5 60 +";
puts( s );
puts( reverse_by_words( s ) );
return 0;
}
The program output is
5 60 +
+ 60 5
If you want to keep leading and trailing spaces as they were in the original string then the functions can look the following way
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
static char *reverse( char *s, size_t n )
{
for ( size_t i = 0; i < n / 2; i++ )
{
char c = s[i];
s[i] = s[n - i -1 ];
s[n - i - 1] = c;
}
return s;
}
char * reverse_by_words( char *s )
{
const char *delim = " \t";
char *first = s, *last = s;
for ( char *p = s; *p; )
{
p += strspn( p, delim );
if ( last == s ) first = last = p;
if ( *p )
{
char *q = p;
p += strcspn( p, delim );
last = p;
reverse( q, p - q );
}
}
reverse( first, last - first );
return s;
}
int main(void)
{
char s[] = "\t\t\t5 60 +";
printf( "\"%s\"\n", s );
printf( "\"%s\"\n", reverse_by_words( s ) );
return 0;
}
The program output is
" 5 60 +"
" + 60 5"