counting words in a text file...

what is the best way to count the number of words in a text file...excluding white space, end of lines, and end of file?
The problem I'm having is that when I do my word count I always come up with more words than there are in the file.
I have attached my code followed by a sample text file.

Thanks!
Flight

attached is the source code file.

>what is the best way to count the number of words in a text file... ?

Take a look at this. And then check out the followups.

thanks dave..I looked at it tried what was suggested and still got the wrong answer...zero words counted s/b 7 words.

Post a sample of your latest code if you're still having trouble.

>I looked at it tried what was suggested and still got the wrong answer

In the followup, it was suggested that isalpha should be replaced with !isspace. Doing so will result in 6 words being found in your file. The reason it is not 7 is because your file does not end in a newline.

the code works well except it will not count the last word in the file. I noticed the last word doesn't have a line feed at the end. How can I fix this?
Thanks!
flight

Code:

---

include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <ctype.h>

int main()
{
        //local declarations
        char file_name[100] ;
    int count ;

    int update_counter = 0;

    FILE *inp1, *out1 ;

        // init some stuff
    count=0 ;

  // prompt the user
    printf("Enter Filename : ")  ;

        // read the keyboard input
    fgets(file_name, sizeof(file_name), stdin);

        //remove the newline character from the end of the input filename
        file_name[strlen(file_name) - 1] = '\0' ;

        // open input file
        inp1 = fopen(file_name, "r") ;
    if(inp1 == NULL)       
        {
        fprintf(stderr, "can't open %s\n", file_name) ;
        exit(EXIT_FAILURE) ;
        }

        // open output file
        out1 = fopen("output.txt", "w") ;
    if(out1 == NULL)       
        {
        fprintf(stderr, "can't open %s\n", "output.txt") ;
        exit(EXIT_FAILURE) ;
        }

    // count the words in the input file
    for ( ;; )
    {
      int ch = fgetc(inp1);
      if ( ch == EOF )
      {
          break;
      }
      if ( isalpha(ch) || isdigit(ch) || ispunct(ch))
      {
          update_counter = 1;

      }
      if ( isspace(ch) && update_counter )
      {
          count++;
          update_counter = 0;
      }
    }
 
        //echo the word count for the file
    printf("\nFile %s contains %d words \n\n", file_name, count) ;
 
        //write the word count to the output file
        fprintf(out1,"File %s contains %d words \n", file_name, count) ;

        // we're done...close files
        fclose(inp1) ;
        fclose(out1) ;

  return 0;

---

it's because the word counter is increased when a white space is found, if the file ends with a letter, the program won't find a white space and thus won't increase the counter.
To fix this, add this code after the for loop and before printing the result:

Code:

---

if (update_counter) {
        count++;
}

---

would you consider this an unelegant method? Don't get me wrong I sincerely do appreciate your reply!

yep, I had a similar idea when I posted, the elegant way IMHO is adding this piece of code before the break statement in the for loop. ;)

Thanks again!
flight