strcmp() but with 0-9 AFTER A-Z? (C/C++)
- by Aaron
For reasons I completely disagree with but "The Powers (of Anti-Usability) That Be" continue to decree despite my objections, I have a sorting routine which does basic strcmp() compares to sort by its name. It works great; it's hard to get that one wrong. However, at the 11th hour, it's been decided that entries which begin with a number should come AFTER entries which begin with a letter, contrary to the ASCII ordering. They cite the EBCDIC standard has numbers following letters so the prior assumption isn't a universal truth, and I have no power to win this argument... but I digress.
Therein lies my problem. I've replaced all appropriate references to strcmp with a new function call nonstd_strcmp, and now need to implement the modifications to accomplish the sort change. I've used a FreeBSD source as my base: http://freebsd.active-venture.com/FreeBSD-srctree/newsrc/libkern/strncmp.c.html
if (n == 0)
return (0);
do {
if (*s1 != *s2++)
return (*(const unsigned char *)s1 -
*(const unsigned char *)(s2 - 1));
if (*s1++ == 0)
break;
} while (--n != 0);
return (0);
I guess I might need to take some time away to really think about how it should be done, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who's experienced the brain-deadness of just-before-release spec changes.
