C Program that Counts words like a Unix word count

I was given an assignment in which i have to write a C program that will read data from standard input one character at a time and output the results to standard output. This program should work somewhat like the Unix word count program wc.

The program should count the number of words and lines in the input stream, and print these two numbers on the standard output. Each of these numbers should be right-justified in an 8-column field. The (decimal) number representing the number of words should be in the first 8-columns and the number of lines should be in columns 9-16. Counting the number of words depends on the definition of a word. For this assignment, a "word" is a maximal [nonempty] sequence of characters that do not include blanks, tabs, newlines, hyphens (-), nor colons. Thus "one;two" is considered a single word, but "one:two" would count as two words.

I am use to using java, which we were introduced from the beginning of this course. Sorry if i am asking for much, i am just really panicking because C programming is so new to me.:frown:

C question.Must be moved by the admins of the forum in the C thread.

Meanwhile you can take a look in scanf function :)

Okay thank you!

I'd do with
a) fgets()
b) a user-defined function to count words in a line

fgets() reads lines from the input, so you just need to put it in a loop and count how many times the loop is executed: that's the number of lines (check for miscalculations at the end of the input)

the user-defined function can be a very simple finite state automaton.

getchar i would say is what the professor wants them to use it,but if you read my most,this a post that has been re-opened in the C thread,so write there please any suggestions that you might have :)

EDIT-> Oops,we are in C thread,sorry gny!But the new guy has opened the post again and i gave an answer there

Did you miss the part of the assignment that states:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NewGuy2CProg

... that will read data from standard input one character at a time...

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;)