Obfuscated C (idea)

Does This Code Make Me Look Obfuscated?

Okay, last year, when I was but a wee Freshman in High School, during the late spring I was just about done with my Intro To Unix course, and I using Linux like a fanatic. I went up to my programming teacher (one guy taught Unix, C, C++, Data Structures, Assembly, and HTML) and asked him if I could skip Intro to Programming and C I and go right on ahead to C II. He said "Sure, knock yourself out". So I spent that summer learning to code C on my own. Well, come last fall, I coded nothing like the other students. At first it was just a format thing, but I got a program off freshmeat to help me out. Anyway, I still look at problems differently then my teacher. For instance, we recently had an argument over white space removal from a string.

He coded it this way, using two increments (in retrospect, I think I would use this way anyway):

while (str[i] != '\0') {
  if (str[j] == ' ') {
    ++j;
    continue;
  }
  str [i++] = str[j++]
}

And I coded the same problem using one increment, and lots of strcpys. Given that I only had strings of 128 characters, I figured it wouldn't be too much extra work for the program. My teacher didn't think it could be done. Here's how I coded it:

while (str[i] != '\0') {
  if (str[i] == ' ') {
    strcpy( str + i, str + (i + 1) );
    continue;
  }
  i++;
}

I know, it's probably not the way the pros do it. But believe it or not, after clocking both versions of code 100,000 times, my teacher's code was a second faster in Real Time, but my code had better User Time and System Time. Very weird.

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Update: Thanks Azure Monk for benching the code, I was about to do it myself but it looks like your benchmark is better then the crude ones I was making. None the less, I find it kind of hard to believe that over all the recursive function was the fastest method most frequently (my teacher's code performed the best over all, however). Ahh... it definitely looks prettiest in perl anyway...
munificent: My teachers code would behave that way if it weren't for the fact that when str + j yields a whitespace it just increments j and continues to loop. In Azure Monks code str is returned to its original memory location after the loop finishes (it goes its original length - the amount of whitespace removed back in memory, but it would help if it weren't so obfuscated ;-).