This question is for C programming.
I have a function that takes a string and returns the plural version of the string. For example, if I passed the function the string “chair” it would return “chairs”. My question is, is there a way to pass the original string to the function Plural and NOT have the original string be modified? As you will see in my code, I want to first print the plural version of the word by passing the original string to the function Plural, and then I want to print the non-plural version of the word by just using the original string and a %s placeholder. However, this doesn't work since the original string gets modified by the function call to Plural. The only thing I can think of to do to not modify it is first make a copy of the original string in the main function, then pass the copy to the function plural. However, in this case I would not be passing the original string to the function; I would be passing the copy, and I'm wondering if there is a way to do this without using a copy. If there is, please show me the code on how to do it.
#include
#include
#define STRSIZ 20
char *Plural(char *noun);
int main(void) {
char temp[15] = “chair”;
/*this will print “chairs”*/
printf(“%sn”, Plural(temp));
/*want it to print “chair”, but it prints “chairs” since original string was modified”*/
printf(“%s”, temp);
return 0;
}
char *Plural(char *noun) {
int len = strlen(noun);
if (noun[len – 1] == 'y') {
strcpy(&noun[len – 1], “ies”);
}
else if (noun[len – 1] == 's' ||
(noun[len – 2] == 's' && noun[len – 1] == 'h') ||
(noun[len – 2] == 'c' && noun[len – 1] == 'h')) {
strcat(noun, “es”);
}
else {
strcat(noun, “s”);
}
return noun;
}
