Array not being fully parsed in C program

Question

I am trying to build a program that parses an array of chars from input and then returns a formatted omitting extra whites spaces.

#include <stdio.h>
# include <ctype.h>
/* count charecters in input; 1st version */
int main(void)
{

  int ch, outp=0;
  char str[1000], nstr[1000];
  /* collect the data string */
  while ((ch = getchar()) != EOF && outp < 1000){
    str[outp] = ch;
    outp++;
  }
  for (int j = 0; j < outp-1; j++){
    printf("%c",str[j]);
  }

  printf("\n");
  for (int q = 0; q < outp-1; q++)
    {
      if (isalpha(str[q]) && isspace(str[q+1])){
        for(int i = 0; i < outp; i++){
          if (isspace(str[i]) && isspace(i+1)){
            continue;
          }
          nstr[i] = str[i];
        }
      }
    }
  printf("\n");

  printf("Formated Text: ");
  for (int i = 0; i < outp-1; i++){
     printf("%c", nstr[i]);
  }
  //putchar("\n");c
  // printf("1");

return 0;
}

Here is my code. The array is never fully parsed, the end is usually omitted, odd chars show up and past attempts have yielded a not fully parsed array, Why? This is exercise 1-9 from "the C programming language".

Answer 1

a) You need to use an additional index variable while copying the characters from str to nstr. Do something like -

for(int i = 0, j = 0; i < outp -1; i++){
      if (isspace(str[i]) && isspace(i+1)){
        continue;
      }
      nstr[j++] = str[i];
    }

b) While you are printing nstr, you are using the length of the original string str. The length of nstr will be less than that of str since you have removed the spaces.

You need to find the length of nstr now or use i < strlen(nstr) -1 in the condition.