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Word count

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Join Date: Jun 2006

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sgriffiths sgriffiths is offline

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Junior Poster in Training

Word count

Jul 18th, 2007

Hello

I would like to count how many words are in a string

ie "PETER JOHNSON LTD"

so this string contains 3

I was going to use strtok but this is too slow.

Any other ideas?

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Join Date: Jun 2007

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Hamrick

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Posting Whiz

Re: Word count

Jul 18th, 2007

Go over the string and count spaces. The number of words is one more than the number of spaces in the string if the string isn't empty.

 Help with Code Tags 
 C Syntax (Toggle Plain Text) 
#include <stdio.h>
#include <ctype.h>
 
int main( void ) {
  char string[100];
  int i;
  int count = 0;
 
  printf( "Enter a sentence> " );
  fgets( string, 100, stdin );
  string[strlen( string ) - 1] = '\0';
 
  /* count the words */
  for ( i = 0; string[i]; ++i ) {
    if ( isspace( string[i] ) ) {
      ++count;
    }
  }
 
  if ( i > 0 ) {
    ++count;
  }
 
  printf( "\"%s\" has %d words\n", string, count );
 
  return 0;
}
#include <stdio.h>
#include <ctype.h>

int main( void ) {
  char string[100];
  int i;
  int count = 0;

  printf( "Enter a sentence> " );
  fgets( string, 100, stdin );
  string[strlen( string ) - 1] = '\0';

  /* count the words */
  for ( i = 0; string[i]; ++i ) {
    if ( isspace( string[i] ) ) {
      ++count;
    }
  }

  if ( i > 0 ) {
    ++count;
  }

  printf( "\"%s\" has %d words\n", string, count );

  return 0;
}

Last edited by Hamrick; Jul 18th, 2007 at 10:05 am.

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Ancient Dragon Ancient Dragon is offline

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Still Learning

Re: Word count

Jul 18th, 2007

>>Go over the string and count spaces
Generally, yes, but you also have to check if words are separated by more than one white space (spaces or tabs). When a white space character is encountered you have to increment the loop counter until the first non-white space character or end-of-string is found before continuing the loop. If you don't, the word count might be wrong.

Last edited by Ancient Dragon; Jul 18th, 2007 at 11:28 am.

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~s.o.s~

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Failure as a human

Re: Word count

Jul 18th, 2007

Try something like this. It would work for any kind of whitespaces (newline, spaces, tabs).

 Help with Code Tags 
 c Syntax (Toggle Plain Text) 
int main(void)
{
    char str[] = " hello \n   to all \n\r\f the \t people ";
    int limit = strlen(str);
    int i, change = 1, words = 0;
    for(i = 0; i < limit; ++i)
    {
        if(!isspace(str[i]))
        {
            if(change)
            {
                ++words;
                change = 0;
            }
        }
        else
        {
            change = 1;
        }
    }
    printf("Word count: %d\n", words);
    getchar();
    return(0);
}
int main(void)
{
    char str[] = " hello \n   to all \n\r\f the \t people ";
    int limit = strlen(str);
    int i, change = 1, words = 0;
    for(i = 0; i < limit; ++i)
    {
        if(!isspace(str[i]))
        {
            if(change)
            {
                ++words;
                change = 0;
            }
        }
        else
        {
            change = 1;
        }
    }
    printf("Word count: %d\n", words);
    getchar();
    return(0);
}