Please help with Scrabble trouble shooting

Question

I am very stuck with scrabble.

I seem to have the everything working correctly EXCEPT when the words contain the letters 'a','b' or 'c'.

I will post a simplified snippet of the code below and just the compute score section, I have removed some parts of the full solution I had and added some parts that may seem unnecessary because I'm trying to pinpoint what is going wrong.

int compute_score(string word) {

// TODO: Compute and return score for string
   int n = strlen(word);
for (int l = 0; l < n; l++)
    if(isupper(word[l]))
    {
        word[l] = tolower(word[l]);
    }

printf("%s\n", "word: "); printf("%s\n", word);

printf("\n\n");
for (int l = 0; l < n; l++)
    for (int a = 0; a < 26; a++)
    if(word[l] == (a + 97))
    {
        word[l] = POINTS[a];
        printf("%i\n", word[l])
       
    }

    else if(word[l] == a)
    {
        word[l] = 0;
        printf("%s\n", "Here");
        printf("%i\n", word[l]);
        printf("%i\n", a);
        printf("\n");
    }

printf("\n");
int sum = 0;
for (int l = 0; l < n; l++)
{
    sum = sum + word[l];
}
return sum;

}

I am having the code print out the value of each word[l] to identify the problem, and every word[l] prints out the corresponding value of POINTS[a] correctly

Except the letters a,b & c.

So for example, if I enter "xyz" for word1 the program will print

8 4 10

Which is great, that's exactly what I want.

But if for word1 I enter "abc"

The program will output

1 0 3 0 3 0

So there are two outputs for each letter, the first is correct and the second is 0 for some reason.

And when calculating "sum" it only takes into account the '0' outputs.

I have tried so many different things to try to figure out what is causing this and I'm out of ideas.

As you can see in the else if(word[l] == a) section

I am now having it print out the value of a that 'a','b' & 'c' that are triggering this are and when I enter word1: abc

The output is

Here 0 1

Here 0 3

Here 0 3

So 'a' == 1, 'b' == 3 and 'c' == 3, I don't understand how this is possible or why this is happening, and why it doesn't happen to any other letters other than a,b and c.

Any help would be really appreciated.

Answer 1

For troubleshooting suggest you change the first printf("%i\n", word[l]) to printf("the letter is %c\n", word[l]). Remembering that word[l] needs to be the entered letter for the entirety of the a loop. The spoiler reveals the cause and a suggestion for solving.

The cause of the problem is changing the value of word[l] while iterating over word[l] (in the a loop). When the first letter is 'a', word[l] is changed to 1. On the next iteration of the a loop (i.e. when a = 1), this else if(word[l] == a) is true.

Consider using a different variable for the accumulator thus never changing word[l]. This could also eliminate the need for the "sum" loop. Hint, hint.