StackOverflow – RotateString

Someone asked the following question on StackOverflow. Before I could post my answer, it was removed. Hmm, so He/She tried to abuse StackOverflow! Anyway, I found that question interesting.

The question was to write a function to rotate a string of words. Words are separated by ‘ ‘ (space). In the result string, the words should remain human readable. The function will also take an integer argument that will specify number of words to rotate.

example:

string source = “A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

rotateString(source, 3);

Should give:

the lazy dog. A quick brown fox jumps over

Here is my solution:

static string rotateString(string source, int rotationCount)
{
    if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(source) || rotationCount <= 0)
        return source;

    int pivot = 0;
    List<int> delimiterLocations = new List<int>();
    char[] sourceChars = new char;

    char temp;
    // Reverse the whole string and
    // save the dilimiter locations
    for (int i = 0; i < source.Length; i++)
    {
        sourceChars = source[i];

        if (delimiterLocations.Count < rotationCount && source[i] == ' ')
            delimiterLocations.Add(source.Length - i - 1);

    }

    // calculate neededDelimiters mod wordCount
    // (assume words = delimiterCount + 1)
    pivot = rotationCount % (delimiterLocations.Count + 1);

    if (pivot > 0)
        pivot = delimiterLocations[pivot-1];
    else
        return source;

    // reverse the first part
    for (int i = 0, j = pivot - 1; i <= j; i++, j--)
    {
        temp = sourceChars[i];
        sourceChars[i] = sourceChars[j];
        sourceChars[j] = temp;
    }

    // reverse the second part
    for (int i = pivot + 1, j = sourceChars.Length - 1;
         i <= j; i++, j--)
    {
        temp = sourceChars[i];
        sourceChars[i] = sourceChars[j];
        sourceChars[j] = temp;
    }

    return new string(sourceChars);
}