using qsort to sort two arrays simultaneously?

Question

I can sort a array of pointers to words so that they are ordered alphabetically, the problem is that I need to ALSO sort an integer array (the number of times that specific

Answer 1

A simple thing to do would be to use a struct to store word/frequency pairs and then sort an array of these structs.

For example:

struct WordFrequency
{
    const char * word;
    int frequency;
} wordFreqs[numWords];        // Assumes numWords is static/global and constant...

Then:

for (i = 0; i < numWords; i++) {
    printf("%s - %d\n", dictionary[i], frequency[i]);
    wordFreqs[i].word = dictionary[i];
    wordFreqs[i].frequency = frequency[i];
}

//sorts the dictionary so that the words are 'alphabetical'
qsort(wordFreqs, numWords, sizeof(struct WordFrequency), wfcmp);  

for (i = 0; i < numWords; i++) {
    printf("%s - %d\n", wordFreqs[i].word, wordFreqs[i].frequency); 
}

And:

int wfcmp(const void *p1, const void *p2) {
     return strcmp(((const struct WordFrequency *)p1)->word, ((const struct WordFrequency *)p2)->word);
}