I am writing a C program that should print the Cartesian product of n sets, where the elements of each set are the line of text in one file, and the names of the n files are passed as command-line arguments. So far I managed to read every line into matrix of strings. However I cannot wrap my head around how to write the algorithm for printing the product.
Here is what I have so far:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#define LSIZ 128
#define RSIZ 10
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
char input[LSIZ];
int n = argc;
char *sets[argc - 1][RSIZ];
int i = 0;
int j = 0;
int y = 1;
FILE *file = NULL;
if (argc == 1)
{
printf("nofiles");
}
else
{
while (--argc > 0)
{
if ((file = fopen(argv[y], "r")) == NULL)
{
printf("cat: failed to open %s\n", *argv);
return 1;
}
else
{
for (j = 0; j < RSIZ && fgets(input, sizeof(input), file); ++j)
{
int lineLen = strlen(input) + 1;
sets[i][j] = strncpy(malloc(lineLen), input, lineLen);
}
fclose(file);
j = 0;
}
i++;
y++;
}
}
return 0;
}
You can implement Cartesian products with an odometer-like counter:
So assuming that you have read the information from the files into NULL
terminated lists of strings, you could do the following:
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdbool.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
const char *adj1[] = {"little", "big", "huge", NULL};
const char *adj2[] = {"red", "yellow", "grey", "orange", NULL};
const char *noun[] = {"house", "car", NULL};
const char **list[3] = {adj1, adj2, noun};
const char **curr[3];
unsigned n = sizeof(list) / sizeof(*list);
unsigned count = 0;
bool done = false;
for (unsigned i = 0; i < n; i++) {
curr[i] = list[i];
}
while (!done) {
unsigned i = 0;
printf("%s %s %s\n", *curr[0], *curr[1], *curr[2]);
count++;
curr[i]++;
while (*curr[i] == NULL) {
curr[i] = list[i]; // back to beginning
i++; // move to next list
if (i == n) { // stop when the last list is exhausted
done = true;
break;
}
curr[i]++; // ... and increment that
}
}
printf("%u combinations.\n", count);
return 0;
}
This approach is not limited to three lists. (If you know exactly how many lists you have, you could use nested loops, of course.)