Replacing spaces with tabs. Exercise 1-21 in "The C Programming Language"

Welcome to Code Review! I'm always glad to see someone who reads the classics.

You made some interesting observations about the program.

The statement Use more "self-explaining" variable names is absolutely correct: the variable name nb could definitely be improved. I would like to point out that self-documenting might be better than self-explaining.

If the variable and symbolic constant names are improved it may not need any additional comments.

The header file <stdio.h> includes a symbolic constant BUFSIZ that might be a better length than 80. In some cases BUFSIZ may be the maximum line length for the system; this was true on older Unix systems.

Possible Bug

This code seems out of scope for the problem as it is defined, I would expect to see that it was outputing blanks.

            for (; blankCount > 0; --blankCount)
                putchar('x');

A Good Coding Practice

Code needs to be maintained. This may include adding additional lines to control structures such as if statements and loops. In C and C++ a good programming practice is to have code blocks (complex statements) in all if, else and loop statements even if it isn't currently necessary.

if (CONDITION)
{
    one statement
}
else
{
    one statement
}

while (CONDITION)
{
    one statement
}

Alternate Solution with Simplified Functions

It might be easier to read, write and modify entab() if it called a function to count all the blanks and print the necessary tabs and blanks. Programming in many cases is breaking down a problem into smaller and smaller pieces until each piece is easy to implement. While this may make the entire program a little more complex, each function is simplified.

This example uses a concept you haven't gotten to in the book yet called pointers.

void print_tabs_or_spaces(int tab_count, int out_value)
{
    for (int i = 0; i < tab_count; i++)
    {
        putchar(out_value);
    }
}

char* count_blanks_and_output_tabs_and_spaces(char *c)
{
    int blank_count = 0;

    while (*c == ' ')
    {
        ++blank_count;
        c++;
    }
    int tab_count = blank_count / TABSIZE;
    int space_count = blank_count % TABSIZE;

    print_tabs_or_spaces(tab_count, '\t');
    print_tabs_or_spaces(space_count, ' ');

    return c;
}

void entab(char str[])
{
    char *c = &str[0];    
    while(*c != '\0')
    {
        if (*c == ' ')
        {
            c = count_blanks_and_output_tabs_and_spaces(c);
        }
        else
        {
            putchar(*c);
            c++;
        }
    }
}