PETRA: I will now show you a program that allows you to recover arguments of different types passed in your main function from the command line. For example, you can see here my execution line is ./program And then there are three parameters: -e, 43, and 27.88 Those are all of different types. At least, that's what I intend for them to be. -e is a string. 43 looks like an integer. And 27.88 looks like a decimal. But if you recollect from our previous video, what's passed to the main function are arrays of characters or strings. And so it's going to be our job to convert the string that contains the number 4 and the number 3 as characters into the actual number 43, and the string that contains the characters 2, 7, dot, 8, 8 into that number 27.88 So let me show you how this can be done. Look at this program. My first line is my int main line that receives the number of arguments passed to the main function as well as an array of strings, which contains all the parameters being passed to my main function. As before, I'm printing out here how many arguments I have received from the command line, and I also print out what those arguments are. This is directly taken from our previous program. What's new here is the following. First, I check whether I have indeed received four arguments. Remember, the ./program already counts as one argument, so one. -e is two. 43 is three. And 27.88 that's four. So if indeed there are four arguments, then I enter this if statement. What happens next? I want to make sure that the first argument is indeed a "-e" and not something else. And so I use a function named string compare-- s-t-r-c-m-p. It stands for string compare. And I compare the argument that's stored in location 1 of my array of arguments-- remember location 0 contains ./program. Location 1 contains -e I compare that with the string -e. This function string compare, you haven't seen before, it is defined in the string library string.h, therefore, is included here. We previously wrote a function for this purpose ourselves. But now that we're working in Linux, we can actually use the string library for this purpose. So the strcmp function compares two strings with each other. And it returns a value of zero-- to compare has the value is zero-- if indeed both of these strings are indeed the same. So if they're indeed the same-- so if compare equals zero-- we're going to print out argv[1] equals -e. And otherwise, we're going to print out argv[1] does not equal -e. Next, I'm going to tackle this next string here. So this is stored in argv[2] ; argv[2] is a string. It contains the two characters 4 and 3. And I need to convert that into an integer. And to do that, there's actually a function that does that. It's called atoi, ASCII to integer. And that function is defined in the standard library. That's why I'm including the standard library, that h header file up here. ASCII to integer I passed with the string argv[2]. And it converts that to an integer, which I had in store in the integer whole number. And I can then print that out. So if you print the number out as a %s, as a string, so argv[2] is the string that I printed out with a %s But I can also print that it as a converted integer with a %d So whole number is an integer and I can then print that out. And then there's a very similar method to convert this decimal number 27.88 into a double. And the function is called atof, as an ASCII to float. And I can store that in a float or in double. I pass to it argv[3], which is the 2, 7, 8, 8 string, and out comes an actual decimal number, which I store in decimal number, which I declared as a double. And again, I print out the string first that stores the characters 2, 7, dot, 8, 8. And then I print it out as a double with a %lf and I print out the decimal number here. So in order to compile this program, I actually don't need to include the string library or the standard library, because they're such standard libraries that they are automatically being included for us. So we don't have to do that. So all we have to do is save and then run our program. And here it goes. And it says I have four arguments from the command line. Argument 0 is ./program Argument 1 is -e Argument 2 is 43 And argument 3 is 27.88 Remember that these are all printed out as strings so far because they come from that first for loop where the arguments are printed out as %s, as strings, because that's how they're stored and handed to us. Next comes our conversion. So argument 1 equals -e. Indeed, we figured that out. And 43, that's printed as a 4 and a 3 as a string. As an integer it's 43. But the advantage of having it as an integer is that we could now do math with it. When 43 is stored as a string, as a sequence of characters, we couldn't use that to add something to it or subtract something from it or multiply or do whatever we want in a math problem. But this number 43, as an integer, we can use that mathematically. And the same was true for the 27.88, which is here first printed as a string, but then printed as a double. And notice that by default, a double prints with six decimal places. And that's why those zeros got added in there. And we could specify the number of decimal places if we wanted to. All right, let me just try one more thing. Let me pass in a different argument, let's say, -x down here. We haven't modified the program, so we don't have to recompile. We can just run it. And this time notice that it says argv[1] does not equal -e because we passed in a different argument, namely -x. So now you know how to recover arguments passed to your main function from the command line and how to perform tests on these arguments by using functions such as string compare, right here, or ASCII to integers to make them into integers, or ASCII to float to make them into floats or doubles so that you can actually perform mathematical operations. Now, this was a pretty dense recording and a pretty dense video. So the best way for you to practice and really figure out what's going on is to start playing around. So take this program, change the parameters, and play and see how you can write your own code.
