Number of smallest length of string, in C-CodePudding

I want to make a program, which prints the number of smallest length of string. I have a file of words, which I open from stdin and save it to buffer.

My code so far prints the length of each word. But I can't figure out how to compare these numbers.

For example in file are:

Hello
Hi

My program does:

6
3

The output should be:

I can't figure ou how to continue. Do you have any advice?

#include <stdio.h>

 int min_stat(char str[])
 {
    int min=0;
    for(int i=0; str[i] != '\0'; i  )
    {
        min  ;   
    }
    return min;
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    if(argc < 1){
        fprintf(stderr,"Error\n");
        return 1;
    }

    char param = argv[1][0];
    int val=100;
    char buffer[val];
    if(param == '1')
    {
        while(fgets(buffer, val, stdin) != NULL)
        {
            int a = min_stat(buffer);
            printf("%d\n", a);
        }  
    }
    return 0;
}

CodePudding user response：

You need to save the minimum lenght of the string somewhere and update it if a shorter string is detected. Your min_stat function returns the number of characters of the string.

I would use something like this:

#define MAX_LENGHT 1000

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    if(argc < 1){
        fprintf(stderr,"Error\n");
        return 1;
    }

    char param = argv[1][0];
    int val=100;
    char buffer[val];

    /* the maximum possible lenght */
    int min_lenght = MAX_LENGHT;

    if(param == '1')
    {
        while(fgets(buffer, val, stdin) != NULL)
        {
            int a = min_stat(buffer);
             
            /* update the mimimum lenght if it is smaller 
               than the current value */
            if (a < min_lenght) {
                min_lenght = a;
            }

            printf("%d\n", a);
        }  
    }

    /* print the minimum lenght */
    printf("Minimum: %d\n", min_lenght);

    return 0;
}

You should not use a variable to initialize the char array, because you are using Variable Lenght Arrays (VLA) and not static arrays. If you are learning c you should use static arrays and so:

char buffer[MAX_LENGHT];

where MAX_LENGHT is a constant or a pre-processor definition.