C Program to Find HCF of Two Numbers without Recursion

This C program finds the Highest Common Factor (HCF) of two given numbers without using recursion.

Problem statement

Write a C program to find the Highest Common Factor (HCF) of two numbers without using recursion.

Inputs:

• Two integers represent the numbers for which the HCF needs to be found.

Output:

• The HCF of the two input numbers.

Note:

• The program assumes that the input numbers are positive integers.
• The program does not handle negative numbers or floating-point numbers.

C Program to Find HCF of Two Numbers without Recursion

#include <stdio.h>

int findHCF(int num1, int num2) {
    int hcf;
    int smaller = (num1 < num2) ? num1 : num2;

    for (int i = 1; i <= smaller; i++) {
        if (num1 % i == 0 && num2 % i == 0) {
            hcf = i;
        }
    }

    return hcf;
}

int main() {
    int num1, num2;
    printf("Enter two numbers: ");
    scanf("%d %d", &num1, &num2);

    int hcf = findHCF(num1, num2);
    printf("The HCF of %d and %d is %d\n", num1, num2, hcf);

    return 0;
}

How it works

1. The program starts by prompting the user to enter two numbers.
2. The scanf() function is used to read the two input numbers from the user.
3. The main() function then calls the findHCF() function, passing the two input numbers as arguments.
4. Inside the findHCF() function, a variable hcf is declared to store the highest common factor.
5. The function determines the smaller of the two input numbers using the ternary operator.
6. A for loop is used to iterate from 1 up to the value of the smaller number.
7. For each iteration, the function checks if both input numbers are divisible by the current value of i.
8. If they are, the hcf variable is updated with the current value of i.
9. At the end of the loop, the hcf variable will contain the highest common factor of the two input numbers.
10. The findHCF() function returns the value of hcf to the main() function.
11. Finally, the main() function displays the result by printing the HCF of the two input numbers.

The program uses a simple iterative approach to find the highest common factor without using recursion. By checking divisibility of the numbers starting from 1 and updating the hcf variable whenever a common factor is found, the program determines the HCF efficiently.

Input / Output