Convert String into Array of Strings in C

I'm trying to divide a string of alphabetically sorted words char *str = "a/apple/arm/basket/bread/car/camp/element/..." into an array of strings alphabetically like so:

arr[0] = "a/apple/arm"
arr[1] = "basket/bread"
arr[2] = "car/camp"
arr[3] = ""
arr[4] = "element"
...

I'm not very skilled in C, so my approach was going to be to declare:

char arr[26][100]; 
char curr_letter = "a";

and then iterate over each char in the string looking for "/" follow by char != curr_letter, then strcpy that substring to the correct location.

I'm not sure if my approach is very good, let alone how to implement it properly. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Solution

So we basically loop through the string, and check if we found the "split character' and we also check that we didn't find the 'curr_letter' as the next character.

We keep track of the consumed length, the current length (used for memcpy later to copy the current string to the array).

When we find a position where we can add the current string to the array, we allocate space and copy the string to it as the next element in the array. We also add the current_length to consumed, and the current_length is reset.

We use due_to_end to find out if we have a / in the current string, and remove it accordingly.

Try:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main() {
        char *str = "a/apple/arm/basket/bread/car/camp/element/...";
        char split_char = '/';
        char nosplit_char = 'a';

        char **array = NULL;
        int num_elts = 0;

        // read all the characters one by one, and add to array if 
        // your condition is met, or if the string ends
        int current_length = 0; // holds the current length of the element to be added
        int consumed = 0; // holds how much we already added to the array
        for (int i = 0; i < strlen(str); i++) { // loop through string
                current_length++; // increment first
                int due_to_end = 0;
                if ( ( str[i] == split_char // check if split character found
                    && ( i != (strlen(str) - 1) // check if its not the end of the string, so when we check for the next character, we don't overflow
                    && str[i + 1] != nosplit_char ) ) // check if the next char is not the curr_letter(nosplit_char)
                   || (i == strlen(str) - 1 && (due_to_end = 1))) { // **OR**, check if end of string
                        array = realloc(array, (num_elts + 1) * sizeof(char *)); // allocate space in the array
                        array[num_elts] = calloc(current_length + 1, sizeof(char)); // allocate space for the string
                        memcpy(array[num_elts++], str + consumed, (due_to_end == 0 ? current_length - 1 : current_length)); // copy the string to the current array offset's allocated memory, and remove 1 character (slash) if this is not the end of the string

                        consumed += current_length; // add what we consumed right now
                        current_length = 0; // reset current_length
                }
        }

        for (int i = 0; i < num_elts; i++) { // loop through all the elements for overview
                printf("%s\n", array[i]);
                free(array[i]);
        }
        free(array);
}