Learn to Program with C_ Learn to Program using the Popular C Programming Language ( PDFDrive )

Chapter 6 ■ Characters
Program P6.2
//read and print the first 3 characters in the data
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
printf("Type some data and press 'Enter' \n");
for (int h = 1; h <= 3; h++) {
char ch = getchar();
}
}
printf("Character %d is %c \n", h, ch);
The following is a sample run of the program:
Type some data and press 'Enter'
Hi, how are you?
Character 1 is H
Character 2 is i
Character 3 is ,
If we want to read and print the first 20 characters, all we have to do is change 3 to 20 in the for
statement.
Suppose the first part of the data line contains an arbitrary number of blanks, including none.
How do we find and print the first non-blank character? Since we do not know how many blanks
to read, we cannot say something like “read 7 blanks, then the next character.”
More likely, we need to say something like “as long as the character read is a blank, keep
reading.” We have the notion of doing something (reading a character) as long as some ‘condition’
is true; the condition here is whether the character is a blank. This can be expressed more
concisely as follows:
read a character
while the character read is a blank
read the next character
Program P6.3 shows how to read the data and print the first non-blank character. (This code
will be written more concisely later in this section.)
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