Performing a sum between two arrays of digis - c

Question

Had an interview today and I was asked the following question - given two arrays arr1 and arr2 of chars where they contain only numbers and one dot and also given a value m, sum them into one array of chars where they contain m digits after the dot. The program should be written in C. The algorithm was not important for them, they just gave me a compiler and 20 minutes to pass their tests.
First of all I though to find the maximum length and iterate through the array from the end and sum the values while keeping the carry:
int length = (firstLength < secondLength) ? secondLength : firstLength;
char[length] result;
for (int i = length - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
// TODO: add code
}
The problem is that for some reason I'm not sure what is the right way to perform that sum while keeping with the dot. This loop should just perform the look and not counter to k. I mean that at this point I thought just adding the values and at the end i'll insert another loop which will print k values after the dot.
My question is how should look the first loop I mentioned (the one that actually sums), I'm really got stuck on it.

Answer 1

The algorithm was not important
Ok, I'll let libc do it for me in that case (obviously error handling is missing):
void sum(char *as, char *bs, char *out, int precision)
{
float a, b;
sscanf(as, "%f", &a);
sscanf(bs, "%f", &b);
a += b;
sprintf(out, "%.*f", precision, a);
}

Answer 2

It actually took me a lot longer than 20 mins to do this. The code is fairly long too so I don't plan on posting it here. In a nutshell, the code does:
normalize the 2 numbers into 2 new strings so they have the same number of decimal digits
allocate a new string with length of longer of the 2 strings above + 1
add the 2 strings together, 2 digits at a time, with carrier
it is not clear if the final answer needs to be rounded. If not, just expand/truncate the decimals to m digits. Remove any leading zero if needed.

Answer 3

I am not sure whether this is the best solution or not but here's a solution and I hope it helps.
#include<stdio.h>
#include<math.h>
double convertNumber(char *arr){
int i;
int flag_d=0; //To check whether we are reading digits before or after decimal
double a=0;
int j=1;
for(i=0;i<arr[i]!='\0';i++){
if(arr[i] !='.'){
if(flag_d==0)
a = a*10 + arr[i]-48;
else{
a = a + (arr[i]-48.0)/pow(10, j);
j++;
}
}else{
flag_d=1;
}
}
return a;
}
int main() {
char num1[] = "23.20";
char num2[] = "20.2";
printf("%.6lf", convertNumber(num1) + convertNumber(num2));
}