Thread: Number of words in a string problem

Originally Posted by MVK059

The normal method is to do a count++ when a space is detected but what in case of multiple ;; or ]] or any special case. How do I make the complier to ignore special characters?

Try writing a simple state machine. You have two states: you are either dealing with a word or you are dealing with a word separator. Check the current character. If it is a word character and you are dealing with a word separator, then you increment the count and change the state. Otherwise, you skip the current character, changing the state if necessary.

You might also want to look up functions in the standard header <ctype.h>. There are various functions there for testing if a character is in various categories, such as alphabetic, uppercase, lowercase, punctuation, whitespace, printable.....

@Elizabeth_Keen:
Please don't post full solutions to people's homework problems. First off, it's against the forum guidelines and homework policy (which you were supposed to read and which you agreed to abide by as part of your membership). More importantly, however, is that it makes it harder for people to actually learn to program. Instead they end up simply learning how to copy-paste code. The problem solving skills that are necessary for programming are not developed.

Also, please post your code as plain text next time (our forum will handle syntax highlighting and line numbering), and make sure it's properly indented so it is easy to read and follow the logic.

This is all somewhat moot, however, since your program is broken. Things that are wrong:

• conio.h is an ancient, outdated header that is not standard C, many people don't have it and including it only makes your code broken on their systems. The only function you use from conio.h is getch(), which is to wait for a keypress before exiting (also, you don't tell the user to press any key to exit, which you should do so they don't think your program is stuck). Prefer the standard function getchar(), which is part of stdio.h, to wait for a keypress.
• You use gets. Gets is bad, read this link.
• It does not handle strings with leading or trailing spaces correctly.
• It does not handle multiple spaces between words correctly.
• NULL is not quite the same as '\0'. NULL is a pointer with a value of 0 (though the internal representation for any given architecture may be different). '\0' is a character constant representing the null character and used to mark the end of strings, which also has a numeric value 0. When you are comparing characters looking for the end of string marker, prefer '\0' since it more clearly expresses what you are doing, and the type matches the type of object you are comparing (i.e. both are chars) instead of comparing a char (str[i]) to a pointer (like NULL).

Originally Posted by Elizabeth_Keen

You can try the below code.
insert

Code:

#include

Code:

<

Code:

stdio.h>

#include<conio.h>
int main()
{
 int count_words=0,i;
 int count_char=0; 
 char str[20];
 printf("Enter string : ");
 gets(str);
 for(i=0; str[i]!=NULL; i++)
 { 
   count_char++;
   if(str[i]==' ')
      count_words++;
 }
 printf("\nNumber of characters in string : %d",count_char);
 printf("\nNumber of words in string : % d",count_words+1); 
getch();
 return 0;
}

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