A strange Square

Hi everybody!

In the last post I showed you the the way I approached the "Print a rectangle test".
The next test I'll have to tackle is:

Print a crossed square to the console

So I started with the nearly the same code I used in my last project, but I quickly realized that the three for loops I used made everything way harder than it should be.

So I switched over to two nested for loops:

for (int i = 0; i < x; i++) {
    for(int b = 0; b < x; b++) {
      printf(%c,c);
    }
    printf("\n");
}

This resulted in a completely filled rectangle, just as I intended.
So I once again added a if check to make sure only the parts I wanted to be char where chars.

I started with the walls: the top line should be filled if i == 0, and the bottom if i = x - 1. The walls worked after a similar principle, just replace the i with a b. It's also important to add a else statement to print a space if none of the conditions on top are met.

The cross part was harder than I initially thought. While the line going from the top left corner to the bottom right one was simple as it simply follows the i == b condition, the one going the other way made me scratch my head a lot more.
The thing I came up with was this formula: (i + b) == x - 1
This condition is meet for every point on the line between the bottom left corner and the top right one.

In the end my complete code looked like this:

for (int i = 0; i < x; i++) {
  for(int b = 0; b < x; b++) {
    if(i == 0 || i == x -1 || b == 0 || b == x - 1 || i == b || i + b == x - 1) {
       printf("%c",c );
    } else {
      printf(" ");
    }
  }
printf("\n");

}

If you would try the same thing with 3 individual loops instead of 2 nested ones, you would run into really really unfunny issues with these simple if checks. For example, I had issues with the lines not meeting in the middle or having spaces everywhere but not where I wanted to have them.

Have a nice day!

P.S: I'm sorry for the strange formating. If you know how to fix it please leave me a comment!

P.P.S: Thanks to

Katie Nelson

Welcome tag moderator AKA Unofficial DEV cheerleader. While most of my friends are found on SnapChat or Tic-Toc, you can find me here. And I OOP, but I’m not a VSCO girl.

KatieGirlCoder KatNel20

for telling me how to fix my issues!