Programming series 1.1 - C programming made easy for beginners

 

A lot of students preparing for campus placements are always in a dilemma on how and where to prepare for a technical interview/programming test. This article gives you an exhaustive list of programming questions you need to solve as a fresher/beginner. Solving these will help you understand how to logically arrive at a solution for any programming challenge.

This exhaustive list of questions were collected from students who have attended their on-campus and off-campus placements during the year 2018-2019. We often take it for granted to solve some of the most easy questions. But it is a fact that companies like Microsoft also include a few easy questions to test the candidates.

 

Practicing questions from this exhaustive list will help you clear the recruitment process of a companies like Wipro, Cognizant, TCS, Mindtree, IBM, Amdocs, HCL etc.

C programming questions on Control statements

Knowing control statements in and out is the first step towards getting your hands on C programming. Control statements like if, for, while, do-while, switch case etc form the fundamentals of C programming. An exclusive list of problems related to these concepts are given below.

Easy

• A character is a vowel or consonant

• A character is an alphabet or not

• Ascii values of a character

• Uppercase, Lowercase or special character

• A number is positive or negative

• A number is even or odd

• Area of a circle

• LCM of two numbers

• GCD of two numbers

• Greatest of two numbers

• Greatest of three numbers

• Number of digits in an integer

• Sum of digits of a number

• Sum of N natural numbers

• Sum of numbers in a given range

• Reverse a given number

• Factorial of a number

• Fibonacci series up to n

• Leap year or not

• Prime number or not

• Palindrome or not

• Armstrong number or not

• Strong number or not

• Perfect number or not

• Friendly pair or not (amicable or not)

• Automorphic number or not

• Harshad number or not

• Abundant number or not

• Power of a number

• Factors of a number

• Add two fractions

Medium

• Prime numbers in a given range

• Armstrong numbers between two intervals

• Can a number be expressed as a sum of two prime numbers?

• Replace all 0’s with 1 in a given integer

• Binary to decimal conversion

• Decimal to binary conversion

• Decimal to octal conversion

• Octal to decimal conversion

• Binary to octal conversion

• Octal to binary conversion

• Maximum number of handshakes

• Quadrants in which coordinates lie

• Convert digit/number to words

• Number of days in a given month of a given year

• Permutations in which n people can occupy r seats in a theatre

• Number of times digit 3 occurs in each and every number from 0 to n

• Number of integers which has exactly 9 divisors

• Roots of a quadratic equation

• Count possible decodings of a given digit sequence

C programming questions on Strings

Strings is another basic concept in C programming. A string is nothing but data with data type as char. Some of the must solve programs involving strings are:

• Basic string operations

• Length of the string without using strlen() function

• Toggle each character in a string

• Count the number of vowels

• Remove vowels from a string

• String is a palindrome or not

• Sorting a string in alphabetical order

• Removing brackets from an algebraic expression

• Remove characters in a string except alphabets

• Remove spaces from a string

• Count the sum of numbers in a string

• Capitalize the first and last letter of each word of a string

• Frequency of characters in a string

• Non-repeating characters in a string

• Check if two strings are Anagram or not

• Patterns of 0(1+)0 in the given string

• Replace substring in a string

• Count common subsequence in two strings

• Reverse a string

• Check if two strings match where one string contains wildcard characters

C programming questions on Arrays

An array is the next most fundamental concept of C. Arrays also used in data structures and algorithms. An array is a data structure that stores elements at a contiguous memory location. This is the one of the most popular, easy and tricky concepts in programming and hence most interviewer would certainly prefer questions candidates on such topics.

The major advantage of an array is that it performs the search operation with O(1) complexity. But adding and removing is comparatively slower. Here are some of the popular array-based coding and interview questions for your practice:

1-D Arrays

• Basic array operations (Insert, delete and search an element)

• Smallest and largest element in an array

• Sum of elements in an array

• Check if two arrays are the same or not

• Finding the array type

• Sum of positive square elements in an array

• Second smallest element in an array

• Sorting the elements of an array

• Reversing an array

• Longest palindrome in an array

• Count distinct elements of an array

• Non-repeating elements of an array

• Repeating elements in an array

• Remove duplicate elements in an array

• Minimum scalar product of two vectors

• Maximum scalar product of two vectors

• Can the numbers of an array be made equal?

• Missing elements of a range

• Triplets with a given sum

• Number of even and odd elements in an array

• Frequency of each element of an array

• Symmetric pairs in an array

• Maximum product subarray in a given array

• Arrays are disjoint or not

• Array is a subset of another array or not

• Can all numbers of an array be made equal

• Minimum sum of absolute difference of given array

• Sorting elements of an array by frequency

• Sort an array according to the order defined by another array

• Replace each element of the array by its rank in the array

• Equilibrium index of an array

• Array rotation – Left and right

• Block swap algorithm for array rotation

• Juggling algorithm for array rotation

• Circular rotation of an array by K positions

• Convert an array into a zig-zag fashion

• Merge two sorted arrays

• Longest subarray having an average greater than or equal to k

• Rearrange positive and negative numbers in an array

• Sum of all odd frequency elements in an array

• Median of two sorted arrays

• 0-1 Knapsack problem

2-D Arrays

• Matrix operations (Addition, subtraction and multiplication)

• Transpose  of a matrix

• Upper triangular matrix or not

• Lower triangular matrix or not

• The maximum element in a row

• The maximum element in a column

• Sum of each row and column of a matrix

• Saddle point coordinates of a given matrix

• Sum of elements in the zig-zag sequence of a matrix

• Sum of boundary elements of a matrix

• Matrix printing in a spiral form

• Rotate the matrix by K times

• Matrix rotation by 90 degrees clockwise and anticlockwise

• Maximum size of square submatrix  with all 1’s in a binary matrix

 

Miscellaneous C programming questions

Interviewers generally tend to ask questions which might include more than one concept. One such important type of questions is pattern printing. Over the years, this has become a constant question type asked in a lot of coding rounds. Here are some most asked pattern printing programs for your reference and practice.

• Solid and hollow rectangle star pattern

• Pyramid pattern using stars

• Pyramid pattern using numbers

• Palindromic pyramid pattern printing

• Diamond pattern printing using stars

• Diamond pattern printing using numbers

• Floyd’s triangle

• Pascal triangle