fgetc() not working as I had hoped

Question

I hope i don't get voted down to quickly for this, but I have a project I'm working on for school in which I have to build a spell checker. I decided to use a trie, and it seems to be working, but I have a bug I can't find. I think the issue is in the following,

bool load(const char* dictionary)
{

    if (!rootNode)
    {
        rootNode = trieNodeCreate();
        if (!rootNode)
        {
            printf("could not allocate root node");
            return false;
        }
    }

    // Open the file 
    FILE* fp = fopen(dictionary, "r");

    if (fp == NULL)
    {
        printf("could not open dictioanry %s\n", dictionary);
        return false;
    }


    int index = 0;
    for (int c = fgetc(fp); c != EOF; c = fgetc(fp))
    {
        char word[LENGTH];
        if (c != '\n' )
        {
            word[index] = c;
            index++;
        }
        else
        {
            trieWordInsert(word, rootNode);
            index = 0;
                wordCount ++;

        } 

    }
    fclose(fp);

    if (wordCount)
    {
        return true;
    }
    return false;
}

but I've been unable to find it. The rest of the project can be found at

https://github.com/iMillJoe/spell-checker

Answer 1

Declare your word[LENGTH] array outside of the loop, else it will just discard the word pointer and free the allocated at the end of each cycle, create a new one. I don't think you want that, I think you would rather want that only when the if condition does not get fulfilled.

I may not know what trieWordInsert does, but I will assume that you'll need a 0 terminator.

• Declare word[LENGTH] = { 0 }; right before the for( ... ) { ... }
• Add a memset( word, 0, LENGTH); inside the else block there
• Include memory.h or string.h for the memset if you haven't included either one of those by far

And this should be it, I think...

Edit: After having learned how trieWordInsert more or less issues the word pushed in...

DIRECT CODE FOR EZ MODE:

bool load( const char* dictionary )
{

    if ( !rootNode )
    {
        rootNode = trieNodeCreate( );
        if ( !rootNode )
        {
            printf( "could not allocate root node" );
            return false;
        }
    }

    // Open the file 
    FILE* fp = fopen( dictionary, "r" );

    if ( fp == NULL )
    {
        printf( "could not open dictioanry %s\n", dictionary );
        return false;
    }

    int index = 0;
    char word[LENGTH];
    for ( int c = fgetc( fp ); c != EOF; c = fgetc( fp ) )
    {
        if ( c != '\n' )
        {
            word[index] = c;
            index++;
        }
        else
        {
            word[index] = 0;
            trieWordInsert( word, rootNode );
            index = 0;
            wordCount++;
        }

    }
    fclose( fp );

    if ( wordCount )
    {
        return true;
    }
    return false;
}

Answer 2

I think you didn't end the word with a '\0'

char word[LENGTH];
 if (c != '\n' )
 {
     word[index] = c;
     index++;
 }
 else
 {
     word[index] = '\0'; //missing this one!!!
     trieWordInsert(word, rootNode);
     index = 0;
     wordCount ++;
 } 

I think you better use fscanf and read the file word by word.