Issue with String position appending C program - c

Question

I am trying to write program for piglatin. I was not getting the output what I am expecting.
take the first letter of a “word” and appending that letter to the end of the word with “ay” added to the end as well.
Input : Darrin, what are you doing with 500 and 100?
Output: arrin, hatway reaay ouyay oingday ithway 500 ndaay 100?
Expected Output: arrinday,hatway reay ouyay oingday ithway 500 nday 100?
What's wrong with output : First word not appended with ay
Since I am appending 'ay', I need eliminate the extra 'a' if the word starts with a or end's with 'a'. I just need add ay at the end instead of first letter + ay. For example: Input is Alex and allen are 500 Output should be lexay nday llenay
Also if the starting letter is not alphabet then we should return the same word.
Please help me to solve this
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <string.h>
static char inputBuffer[100];
static char outputBuffer[100];
void translate (void)
{
char bufferValue;
char firstLetter;
int j = 0, k = 0, m = 0;
printf("\n");
while (j < (sizeof(inputBuffer) - 1))
{
bufferValue = inputBuffer[j];
if (((bufferValue >= 'A') && (bufferValue <= 'Z')) || ((bufferValue >= 'a') && (bufferValue <= 'z')))
{
if (j == 0)
{
firstLetter = bufferValue;
}
else if (inputBuffer[j-1] == ' ')
{
firstLetter = bufferValue;
}
else
{
printf("%c", bufferValue);
outputBuffer[m] = bufferValue; m++;
}
}
else if ((bufferValue == ' ') && !(
((inputBuffer[j-1] < 'A') ||
((inputBuffer[j-1] > 'Z') && (inputBuffer[j-1] < 'a')) ||
(inputBuffer[j-1] > 'z'))))
{
printf("%cay%c", firstLetter, bufferValue);
outputBuffer[m] = firstLetter; m++;
outputBuffer[m] = 'a'; m++;
outputBuffer[m] = 'y'; m++;
outputBuffer[m] = bufferValue; m++;
firstLetter = ' ';
}
else
{
printf("%c", bufferValue);
outputBuffer[m] = bufferValue; m++;
}
j++;
}
printf("\n final output: %s",outputBuffer);
return;
}
int main(void)
{
printf("enter the string\t");
fflush(stdin);
gets(inputBuffer);
printf ("\nInput buffer contents: %s", inputBuffer);
translate();
return 0;
}

Answer 1

First word not appended with ay
The problem is just not that only the first word is not being appended by first letter and ay, but whenever you have some non alphabet character at the end of a word (digits/special characters, except space), ay will not be appended to that word.
For example, try this input:
Darrin, what, are you doing with 500 and 100?
You'll get the output:
arrin, hat, reaay ouyay oingday ithway 500 ndaay 100?
So mainly, the problem is in the last else you have:
else
{
printf("%c", bufferValue);
outputBuffer[m] = bufferValue; m++;
}
See, when , comes immediately after a word, the control comes to this else and it just adds the , as it is, it does not append the firstLetter and ay.
But you can't always append firstLetter and ay in this else, you'll have to come up with some kind of condition, so you could separate the 500 and Darrin,, cause 500 will also go through this else statement.
Maybe, you could try checking if firstLetter is an alphabet or not, if it is, then append the firstLetter and ay, otherwise not.
else
{
if ((firstLetter >= 'a' && firstLetter <= 'z') || (firstLetter >= 'A' && firstLetter <= 'Z'))
printf("%cay", firstLetter);
outputBuffer[m] = firstLetter; m++;
outputBuffer[m] = 'a'; m++;
outputBuffer[m] = 'y'; m++;
firstLetter = ' ';
}
printf("%c", bufferValue);
outputBuffer[m] = bufferValue; m++;
}
But this will still not process the words like 0abcdef,, which do have alphabets in it, but start with some non-alphabet character, so that's your call, if you want to put them to the numbers category (like 500), to leave them as they are, or to process them.
Here is the working example.
P.S. I've made some other changes too (which don't affect your output), but the major change was what I explained (which does).
EDIT:
From the comments below:
If the word starts with Vowel(a,e,i,o,u) then just add y else first letter + ay
You can write a function in your program called isVowel to check if some character is vowel or not:
int isVowel(char c)
{
c = tolower(c);
if (c == 'a' || c == 'e' || c == 'i' || c == 'o' || c == 'u')
return 1;
return 0;
}
Now, you're adding ay at two places in your program:
In the else if and the last else:
outputBuffer[m] = firstLetter; m++;
outputBuffer[m] = 'a'; m++;
outputBuffer[m] = 'y'; m++;
firstLetter = ' ';
So, you can add an if at the statements outputBuffer[m] = 'a'; m++; to only add this a if the firstLetter is not a vowel:
outputBuffer[m] = firstLetter; m++;
if (!isVowel(firstLetter))
{
outputBuffer[m] = 'a';
m++;
}
outputBuffer[m] = 'y'; m++;
firstLetter = ' ';
change this at both places i.e. in the else if and else, and you'll be done.
I've updated the code on ideone

Answer 2

The real problem is that you didn't see the forest through the trees which made the implementation awful to read. To add insult to injury, you decided to break the basic rules of code locality (not using globals unless necessary) and DRY (functions to tell if a charater is a letter exist in the standard library of any language I can think of, don't reimplement it), which made it pretty much irrecoverable as far as maintenance is concerned.
Now, let's read the task description again:
take the first letter of a “word” and appending that letter to the end of the word with “ay” added to the end as well.
Notice what already stands out because of quoting: word.
So, I'd divide the implementation into two distinct tasks:
Iterate through a sentence word by word.
Once you can reliably identify words, do the piglatin thing.
The end result of might look like this:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <ctype.h>
void piglatinize(const char* in)
{
static const char* SEP = " .,?"; // word separators
// Iterate input by words
const char *sep = NULL, *word = NULL, *end = in;
while (sep = end, // separators from previous word end
word = &end[strspn(end, SEP)], // start of word
end = &word[strcspn(word, SEP)], // end of word
*sep) // iterate until we hit terminating zero character
{
int wordlen = (int)(end - word);
int seplen = (int)(word - sep);
if (wordlen > 0 && isalpha(word[0])) // word starts with a letter, pig it!
{
char firstletter = tolower(word[0]);
const char* suffix = (firstletter == 'a') ? "y" : "ay";
printf("%.*s%.*s%c%s",
seplen, sep, // separators from previous word
wordlen - 1, &word[1], // word without first letter
firstletter, suffix);
}
else // not a real word, just print unchanged
{
printf("%.*s%.*s", seplen, sep, wordlen, word);
}
}
}
int main()
{
piglatinize("Darrin, what are you doing with 500 and 100?");
}
I admit the while loop continuation condition is a handful. If you have trouble understanding this example you might want to read on strspn (and its opposite strcspn) and the comma operator.