counting number of words in a file

[kavithabhaskar]

Hi I am trying to count the number of words in a file and this is what i have so far. I am not sure about the getchar().. could you please tell me what i should be doing ?

#include<iostream>
#include<fstream>
#include<string>
#include<conio.h>
using namespace std;

int main() {
        string line;
        int size=0, count_words=0;
        char c;
        ifstream myfile("example.rtf");
        if(myfile.is_open()) {
                while (!myfile.eof()) {
                        getline(myfile,line);
                        cout<<line<<endl;
                        size++;

                }

                cout<<"number of lines "<<size<<endl;

        getchar(myfile,c);
        cout<<c<<endl;


        myfile.close();

        }

        else {
                cout<<"file not found"<<endl;
        }

return 0;
}

[WaltP]

You should not be doing while (!myfile.eof()) -- here's why (feof() and .eof() are identical)

After you've read all the lines in the loop, what do you expect getchar() to read?

[kavithabhaskar]

You should not be doing while (!myfile.eof()) -- here's why (feof() and .eof() are identical)

After you've read all the lines in the loop, what do you expect getchar() to read?

Hi:

Thanks for ur reply.

Are you saying that i should use feof instead of eof ? I am not sure.

The other thing is I am not sure what I can do about that getchar. I am positive that what I have in my code is wrong. All I am able to see is that if there is a space, i should increment the counter by 1.

[lotrsimp12345]

just keep counting every time it encounters a space

trying using isspace function I believe that calculates white spaces

while(isspace())
{
count++;
}

something like that.

[WaltP]

Hi:

Thanks for ur reply.

Are you saying that i should use feof instead of eof ? I am not sure.

If they are identical, what do you think? You need to look in your text how to loop through a file.

The other thing is I am not sure what I can do about that getchar. I am positive that what I have in my code is wrong. All I am able to see is that if there is a space, i should increment the counter by 1.

Good, you know there is a problem. That's better than some others I've seen.
You need to think about what you are attempting to do. What designates the end of a word? What indicates the end of a line? Maybe in your loop instead of reading each line you could read each character looking for and counting these indicators.

See what you can do with that idea.

[necrolin]

I'm confused. Your question states that you want to count the number or "words" in a file, but your program is counting the number of "lines" in the file. Which one are you trying to accomplish?

That getchar() is totally useless there because you've already gotten to the end of the file and then you try to read a character, but there's nothing left to read.

My suggestions would be the following:

a) If you want to truly count the number of words in the file then do something like:

- Read the file one character at a time and count the spaces between the words
- Or read the file one word at a time and count each word.

b) If you want to count the number of lines in the file then:

while (getline(myfile, line)) { size++; }

Don't check for eof at all, because you don't need to. It will stop at the end of the file automatically, but do check if the file is open. Maybe something like " if (myfile.fail()) { cerr << "Could not open file\n"; } ".