CS140 -- Lab 4


This lab will give you practice with a number of programming concepts, including:

  1. Dr. Plank's Fields library,
  2. string manipulation,
  3. pointers,
  4. memory allocation,
  5. structs,
  6. linked structures, and
  7. generating test cases for your code


Files that you will need


Blog

A blog is an on-line journal where you or a group of people can post entries about their daily activities, hobbies, personal experiences, etc. In many ways a blog is like an on-line diary. You are going to write a program named blog that reads blog entries and outputs them as formatted html. The blog entries will be presented to you in chronological order, with the least recent post (i.e, the oldest post) presented first, and the most recent post (i.e., the latest post) presented last. You will output the blog entries in reverse chronological order, with the most recent post appearing first, and the least recent post appearing last.

A blog entry will have a person's name, date of creation, and time of creation on one line, and then one or more lines with the person's comments. Each blog entry will be separated by a blank line. You can see a sample input file here. As you can see, dates are presented in mm-dd-yy format. The name, date, and time will each be a single field.

Your program will format each blog entry into a row in an html table. Do not worry if you do not know how to create an html table. I will explain how to do so shortly. Each row will have four columns for the person's name, posting date, posting time, and comment. You will not need to do any processing with either names or times. However, you will need to convert dates from their "mm-dd-yy" format to a format that looks like "month dd, 20yr" where "month" is a three letter abbreviation for the month. For example, "03-20-08" will get translated to "Mar 20, 2008" (I have the list of abbreviations that you should use printed below). A formatted output html page for the sample input can be found here. Note that the blog entries have been reversed from the sample input file, so that they are now ordered from newest to oldest. If you find the "page source" option in your browser, then you can see what the actual html looks like. This is the html that your program will produce.

Data Structures

You will need to use the following data structures for your program:

  1. You will use an inputstruct to read lines from the blog file.
  2. You will use a FILE * pointer to reference the output html file and will use fprintf to write lines to your html file.
  3. You should use a singly linked list to store the blog entries. Since I am asking you to reverse the order of the blog entries, so that they appear from most recent to least recent, you should add each new blog entry to the front of the linked list. For this lab do not use my sllist library. Instead add a link field to your blog entry struct, as described in the next list item.
  4. You will need to use a typedef and a struct for storing each blog entry. You should create a struct using the typedef and assign an appropriate name to the type you have created. The struct should store the following information:

    It is mandatory that you place the declaration for this struct in a header file named blog.h and that you include this header file in your program.
  5. You will use a dynamic array to store the comment field.

Program Design

Roughly speaking, your program will be designed as follows:

  1. You will need to read from the command line the names of the input file containing the blog entries and the output file to which you will write your html code from the command line.
  2. You will need to write a while loop that reads each line from the blog file using the fields library:

    1. When you encounter a blank line you will start a new blog entry.
    2. When you read the first line of a blog entry, you should check to ensure that it contains exactly three fields. If it does not contain exactly three fields, you should print an error message that lists the line number and that tells the user what the problem is. You can mimic the error message I use in my executable. Your program should then exit without creating an output file.

      If the line contains exactly three fields, then you will malloc a blog entry struct and save the person's name and the time at which the entry was posted. You will need to convert the date string to an appropriately formatted string using sprintf. sprintf is just like fprintf and printf, except that it writes into a string, rather than a file or to stdout. You need to provide a string that is big enough to contain the formatted string that you wish to create. Remember to include an extra space for the null (\0) character. For example, if I have two string variables named lastname and firstname, and I want to create a string with the format "lastname, firstname", I can use the following sprintf statement to create the desired string:

             char *formatted_name;
             // calculate the length of the formatted name. The extra 3 characters
             // are for the comma, the space between lastname and firstname, and
             // the null character, \0, at the end of the formatted name
             int name_length = strlen(lastname) + strlen(firstname) + 3;
             sprintf(formatted_name, "%s, %s", lastname, firstname);
      
      You should use the following abbreviations for the months:

      123456 789101112
      JanFebMarAprMayJun JulAugSepOctNovDec

      Hint: You can use the strchr function to help you convert the '-'s in the date string to '\0's, thus giving you a string of the form "mm\0dd\0yy". You can now treat the original string as three separate strings and extract the month, day, and year using sscanf.

    3. When you read the remaining lines of a blog entry, you should simply concatenate them together into one long string. You do not know in advance how long your eventual string will be or how many lines you will have to read. Therefore I suggest that you use a dynamic array to hold the comment as you construct it, and that you resize the array as you add each new fragment of the comment. Hence, as you read each comment line (i.e., each comment fragment), your program 1) figure out how long your comment will be once you concatenate the new fragment to the end of the existing comment 2) realloc your comment string so that it has this newly compute length, and 3) concatenate the new fragment to the end of the realloced comment string.

  3. Once you have finished reading your blog entries, you should write them to your output file. To start your table, output the following two lines, exactly as I have written them, replacing output_file with the name of your output file pointer: fprintf(output_file, "<table borders=\"1\" rules=\"all\" frame=\"none\" cellpadding=\"5\">\n"); fprintf(output_file, "<tr><th>Name</th><th>Date</th><th>Time</th><th width=\"50%%\">Comment</th></tr>\n"); The first line creates a table that has a 1 pixel wide border, no frame, lines between all the table cell entries, and 5 pixels of padding around each table cell. The second line creates a set of column headings and indicates that the comment column should take up 50% of the browser window. Note that I used \" so that fprintf would know that I want to print the \" rather than have it terminate the format string, and I used %% to tell fprintf that I want it to output a % sign, rather than interpret the % sign as the start of a conversion specifier.

    You will then output each row of the table. Each row should start with the tag <tr> and should end with the tag </tr>. Each column should start with the tag <td> and should end with the tag </td>. For example, to get the following column:

    BradAug 8, 200912:20pmClimbing Mt. Whitney

    you would need to output the following lines of html:

    <tr> <td>Brad</td> <td>Aug 8, 2009</td> <td>12:20pm</td> <td>Climbing Mt. Whitney</td> </tr>

Testing Your Code

You need to start to get in the habit of thinking about the various types of errors and boundary conditions that can arise and then testing for them. Several errors and boundary conditions that I expect you to test for in this lab include:

  1. error conditions
    1. wrong number of command line arguments
    2. invalid blog file name
    3. inability to open the output file. One way you can test whether or not your code works is to deny yourself write permission for the output file. You can do so by first creating a file and then using chmod to deny yourself write privileges. For example:
           chmod u-w brad.html
      	 
      The string "u-w" says to subtract write permission from the user, which in this case is yourself. You can re-establish write privileges to the file by using "chmod u+w brad.html".
    4. improper number of fields on the first line of a blog entry
  2. boundary conditions
    1. empty blog file: just output the headers for the table (see my executable)
    2. one or more empty lines at the end of the blog file
    3. a very large blog file with a large number of entries
    4. a very large blog entry (i.e., a blog entry whose comment runs over a great many lines)
  3. normal conditions that your program should handle
    1. more than one line between blog entries
    2. dates whose month or day is a single digit
In this lab you do not have to worry about the date being misformatted or the month or date being too large. You may assume that a date always correctly appears as "mm-dd-yy", although the month and day may be single digits. The year will always be two digits.

Note that blog_data.txt and empty_blog.txt test some of these boundary conditions, but not all of them.


What to Submit

Submit a source file named blog.c and a header file named blog.h.