I'm trying to improve this C program that reads five-letter words from a file and writes those with repeating letters to a new file. Currently, my approach involves nested loops, and I'm worried it's not efficient enough, especially for larger input sizes. The core idea is to track letters and identify any duplicates efficiently. Does anyone have suggestions to simplify or optimize this code? Here's what I have:
```c
int main (){
FILE* a5ptr;
FILE* a5ptr1;
char buffer[7];
char compare[27] = {'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z'};
a5ptr = fopen("5_com_five.txt", "r");
a5ptr1 = fopen("5_test.txt", "w");
while ((fgets(buffer, sizeof(buffer), a5ptr) != NULL)) {
int holder[26] = {0};
for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
char n = buffer[i];
for (int j = 0; j < 26; j++) {
if (n == compare[j]) {
holder[j] += 1;
}
}
}
for (int i = 0; i 1) {
fprintf(a5ptr1, "%s", buffer);
break;
}
}
}
}
```
4 Answers
Consider removing the compare array entirely. You can treat the letters as numbers based on their ASCII values. Just increment `holder[n]++;` if `n` is between 'a' and 'z'. This way, you can quickly check for any repeats while you read through the buffer.
You can simplify your approach! Instead of checking every letter against the compare array, you can calculate the index directly using `holder[n - 'a'] += 1;` for characters. This eliminates the inner loop completely. You also don't need to do the final check in another loop; just keep track of duplicates as you read each character.
Good catch with the code structure! You can optimize further by reading larger chunks of data than just one line at a time, which reduces the number of system calls. Also, if you find a letter with a count greater than 1 while reading, you can write to the output file immediately and break out of the loop.
You’re correct that multiple loops might be slowing things down. Instead of looping through the compare array, just check for duplicates using a simple nested loop within your word length since you're only dealing with five-character words. This way, you only do 10 comparisons at most.
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