How many strings in a file?

[zowen]

Is there any way to determine how many separate strings are in a file? I know that using ifstream to open a file for reading, and using that name to output to a string you can output them one by one, but is there a function to count them?

[Prelude]

It depends on what you consider to be a string. A text file is one big string, so you can be perfectly correct doing this:

size_t strings_in_file ( ifstream& in )
{
  return 1;
}

Of course, you would be assuming that the file is not empty. If you consider a string a sequence of characters ending with a newline, simply read lines from the file and increment a counter. The same goes with sequences of characters separated by whitespace except you can use the >> operator instead of reading a while line.

[eth0]

you will have to read the file in to work with it

read in the chars to a pointer

while (*ptr != '\0')
    {
        if (*ptr == ' ')
        {
            ++counter;
        }
        ptr++;
    }
    
    cout << "There are " << counter + 1 << " words\n";