Check if a character is a space

Question

I'm creating an absurdly simple program in C to mess around with getchar(). The program will print out what you input until you press enter and it will guarantee that your lines are no more than 80 chars each. To do this, I keep a running count of how many characters have been entered. Once the char count hits 70, the next space encountered will cause a line break. If no space is encountered between 70-80, a line break will occur regardless. I realize this is a super naive implementation and could be optimized left and right, but remember, I'm just messing around:

while ((c = getchar()) != '\n') {
    if (lineLengthCount < 70) {
        putchar(c);
        lineLengthCount++;
    }   
    else if (lineLengthCount < 80 && (c == ' ')) {
        printf("%c\n", c); 
        lineLengthCount = 0;
    }   
    else {
        printf("%c\n", c); 
        lineLengthCount = 0;
    }   
}   

The problem is the c == ' ' conditional doesn't seem to be actually checking for a space. I get output like this:

fitter happier more productive comfortable not drinking too much regula
r exercise at the gym three days a week getting on better with your ass
ociate employee contemporaries at ease eating well no microwaved dinner

where I was hoping that the lines would be truncated when a space was encountered. Instead, no matter what character is entered after line 70, a new line is created. am I missing something? Does ' ' really mean any character?

Answer 1

while ((c = getchar()) != '\n') {
    if (lineLengthCount < 70) {
        putchar(c);
        lineLengthCount++;
    }   
    else if (lineLengthCount < 80 && (c == ' ')) {
        printf("%c\n", c); 
        lineLengthCount = 0;
    }   
    else if (lineLengthCount >= 80){
        printf("%c\n", c); 
        lineLengthCount = 0;
    }
    else{
        putchar(c);
        lineLengthCount++;
    }
}

I think this should work. That should prevent the else from executing when there are less than 80 characters but the character isn't a space.

EDIT: I realized now that instead if lineLengthCount is less than 80 but the character isn't a space it wouldn't get printed at all, so I added another else at the end to fix it.

Wouldn't this be shorter and more concise?

while ((c = getchar()) != '\n') {
    putchar(c);
    if((c == ' ' && lineLengthCount >= 70) || lineLengthCount >= 80){
        printf("\n");
        lineLengthCount = 0;
    }
    else
        ++lineLengthCount;
}

Answer 2

There's a problem with your conditions: if lineLengthCount is > 70 but the next character is not a space, the last else will be hit, breaking line and resetting the counter.