Thread: [Help] A program to count the number of words in a sentence!

I am trying to make a program which will return the number of words in a given sentence. It should be able to give correct information even if there are multiple spaces before the sentence, between words or after the sentence. I haven't been able to make it handle multiple spaces after the sentence, because it will always give me the number of words +1.
I thought this could be because it was passing the \0 in the end of the string, so I tried to fill all the empty slots in the string with \0.
I would appreciate if you could help me understand what I am doing wrong!
The program goes as follow:

Code:

#include <stdio.h>


void stuff(char s[], int n){
    int i = 0;
    while (s[i] != '\0'){
        i++;
        }
    for ( i; i < n; i++){
        s[i] = '\0';
    }
}
// A function to count words:
int wcount( char s[] ){
    int i = 0;
    int num = 1;
    while ( s[i] == ' ' ){
        i++; // Preventing errors in case of multiple spaces before the sentence.
    }
    while ( s[i] != '\0' ){
        if ( s[i] == ' '){
            num++;
            while ( s[i] == ' ' ){
                    i++; // Preventing errors if there are multiple spaces between words.
            }
        }
        i++;
    }
    return( num );
}

void main(){
    int const DIM = 100;
    char str[DIM];
    gets(str);
    stuff(str, DIM);
    printf( "The sentence has %d words \n", wcount(str) );
}

Thank you very much in advance!

You're counting the words AFTER you've already scanned off the word with a char. That's a trickier logic, imo.

Increment the word counter right when you hit the first letter of the word - that's when you're inside the word. Then don't do anything with the word counter, until you have come to a space or newline, (a multi-line sentence will have a word at the end of the row, with a newline, but no space after it, before the next word).

Aha!

When you reach the space of newline, you come outside the word, (you can use a flag for inside/outside), now again, the first letter you come to (or digit if you prefer), is a new word, so increment your word counter.

Remove the multiple spaces...

Code:

char * ptr;
do
  { 
     ptr = strstr(string,"  ");
     if (ptr)
       *ptr = '.';
   }
while (ptr);

Now you can count the spaces and get the right answer.

Code:

words = 0;
char* ptr = string;

while (*ptr != 0;)
  {
   if (*ptr == ' ')
     words++;
   ++ptr;
  }