Re: C style , one argument, recursive, string reverse

From:
"Thomas J. Gritzan" <Phygon_ANTISPAM@gmx.de>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Mon, 29 May 2006 23:15:58 +0200
Message-ID:
<e5fo5b$hfd$1@newsreader2.netcologne.de>
zahy[dot]bnaya[At]gmail[dot]com schrieb:

All previous advices were good and appreciated..
Sorry about my stubborness I am really intrested to know why my code
does not work
I remarked it better.

I know it is probably not the best way to do it but can you see a
problem in there?
not for the sake of solving the problem , just for education...
Thanks.


Yes. You forget, that
a) you can't free() space you did't malloc().
b) strings are zero-terminated.

/*
Algorithm pseudo:

   reverse(str)
    if(str="")

// return ""

     else
       return append(last_char(str),
                           reverse(all_but_last_char(str))
*/

char * C_recReverse(char * str)
{
    // Sub is storing the substring
    // res is the returned string
    // tmp is for storing the previos result so it can be deleted
    char* sub, *res, *tmp;

    if (strlen(str) == 0)
    
{
// return "";

        res= (char*)malloc(1);
        res[0] = '\0';
        return res;
    }

     else
    {
        /* the sub and res are allocated per recursion stack*/
        sub = (char*)malloc(sizeof(char)*strlen(str)-1);
        res = (char*)malloc(sizeof(char)*strlen(str));

You will copy the entire string "str" into "sub", so "sub" has to hold
enough space for strlen(str)+1.

"res" has to hold "str" reverse, so dito.

sizeof(char) is defined to be 1.

         /* prepering the substring, stored on the heap*/
        strcpy(sub,str);
        sub[strlen(str)-1] = '\0';

        /* the return value is preperaed , filled with last char*/
        strcpy(res,"");
        strncpy(res,&str[strlen(str)-1],1);

Bad.
res is not null-terminated after this.

         /* calling the reverse function of the "sub" stored
                                    on local variable tmp*/
        tmp = C_recReverse(sub);

        /* adding the result of substring reverse to the result string (res)
*/
        strcat(res,tmp);

        /*"closing" the string (???) */
        res[strlen(str)] = '\0';

        /* Freeing the substring, I dont really need it anymore*/
        free(sub);

        /* Freeing the "previous" recursion closure,
                                  Can I do it? I think this is the
problem */
        free(tmp);
        return res;
    }
}


This is evil C++ code, and I think its evil C, too.

Thomas

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