How can I make this code with all the loops more elegant?

I am grinding away at a simple for-loop exercise where the user can enter a width and a height, and the program prints out a square with stars and spaces, like this:

Enter width and height: 8 4

********
*      *
*      *
********

and I have made a solution, but it just feels like I could redsuce the number of blocks with loops some... Can somebody help me with this? Here is the code:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    int width, height;

    printf("Enter width and height: ");
    scanf("%d %d", &width, &height);

    for(int i = 0; i < 1; i++)
    {
        for (int j = 0; j < width; j++)
        {
            printf("*");
        }
        printf("\n");
    }

    for(int i = 0; i < height - 2; i++)
    {
        printf("*");
        for (int j = 0; j < width -2; j++)
        {
            printf(" ");
        }
        printf("*\n");
    }
    
    for(int i = 0; i < 1; i++)
    {
        for (int j = 0; j < width; j++)
        {
            printf("*");
        }
        printf("\n");
    }      
}

Thank you in advance!

Solution

One way could be:

int main(void)
{
    int width = 8;
    int height = 4;
    for (int h = 0; h < height; ++h)
    {
        for (int w = 0; w < width; ++w)
        {
            if (w == 0 || h == 0 || h == (height-1) || w == (width-1))
            {
                putchar('*');
            }
            else
            {
                putchar(' ');
            }
        }
        putchar('\n');
    }
    return 0;
}

That said... IMO this isn't really better than your approach. The use of 3 simple "loop-blocks" makes it very easy to see what your code is doing. This approach with a single "loop-block" and an if statement is a bit harder to read.

So I would say...

You approach/code is fine if you just delete the lines

for(int i = 0; i < 1; i++)

as they do absolutely nothing.

And use putchar instead of printf for printing a single character.

Then your approach is pretty okay. If you want to avoid the first and last loop-block to be the same (i.e. avoid repeating the same code), you could put the code into a function.