hi, i got a question please

[mikesomething]

so, im learning a bit of c, and going through the k and r book, i got to this question and im stuck

its the one about write a program to print a histogram of the word lengths in its input (horizontal of course)

thing is, i did get it to work, but then i decided to make it check the text first, to get the largest word, then declare the array to the correct size, before executing the part about counting the words and the printf stuff

before i added the while statement to get the largest word stuff, it DID work !!!! now it doesnt

can anyone see why ? i been staring at it since yesterday

#include <stdio.h>


int main () {
    
    int wordsize = 0;
    int wordsizecheck = 0;
    int largestword = 0;
    int pl = 0;
    int c, i = 0;
    
    


    
    while ((c = getchar()) != EOF) { /*to find the largest word in the input, seems to work */
        if (c == ' ' || c == '\t' || c == '\n') {
            if (wordsizecheck > largestword) {
                largestword = wordsizecheck;
            }
            wordsizecheck = 0;
        }
        else {
            ++wordsizecheck;
            if (wordsizecheck > largestword) {
                largestword = wordsizecheck;
            }
        }


    }
    
    printf("largest word = %d\n", largestword); /* to check it worked */
    
    int wordlengths[largestword]; /*set the array*/
    
    
    for (i = 0; i < largestword; ++i) {
        wordlengths[i] = 0;
    }
    
    
    while ((c = getchar()) != EOF) {
        /*count the words of a certain length (this worked before i added the stuff above*/
        if (c == ' ' || c == '\t' || c == '\n') {
            ++wordlengths[wordsize - 1];
            wordsize = 0;
        }
        else {
            ++wordsize;
        }
    }
    if ((c = getchar()) == EOF) {
        ++wordlengths[wordsize - 1];
    }
    
    for (i = 0; i < largestword; ++i) { /*to check array, seems to indicate problam*/
        printf("array value %d = %d\n", i, wordlengths[i]);
    }
        
    for (i = 0; i < largestword; ++i) { /* print histogram ( worked before :( */
        printf("%4d | ", i + 1);
        for (pl = 0; (pl <= wordlengths[i]) && (wordlengths[i] != 0) ; ++pl) {
            printf("*");
        }
        printf("\n");
    }
    return 0;
}

any help id really appreciate, or any criticisms also, thanks

[qny]

After the first loop, you have effectively read all the input (EOF returned from getchar()) ... so the subsequent attempts to read all return EOF.

You're trying to read the input twice. You can't easily do that with streams (stdin used by getchar): imagine stdin is like a water tap ... you can't have the same water flow through the tap twice.

Solution: read the data once only, keep a variable for the longest word, and use big enough arrays (or malloc(), realloc(), and free()).

[ssharish2005]

This could as simple as reading whole string or a word using fgets and process them as a whole word instead of a char. Could be far much better! And also your way of reading char by char has flawed as you are reading them twice and expecting to have the same values. Which will not be the case. Why not do the following to get read the values

while(  fgets( str, 80, STDIN) != NULL )
{
    copy the read string into another string
}

ssharish