Practice 4.

wcount

Write a program which works similary to the wc Unix utility: counts the number of newlines, words and characters of the input. In this simple case, the input is the standard input std::cin.

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//
// wcount -- similar to unix wc command
// counts newlines, words and characters
// v1. reading from standard input
//

#include <iostream>
#include <cctype>     // for std::isspace

int main()
{
  int lcount = 0; // newlines
  int wcount = 0; // words
  int ccount = 0; // characters

  char ch;          // current character to read in
  char prev = '\n'; // previous char for wcount initialized 
                    //   to whitespace for the very first 
                    //   word at the beginning of the input

  std::cin >> std::noskipws; // otherwise operator>> 
                             //   skips the whitespaces 
  while ( std::cin >> ch )   // true until reading fails
  {
    ++ccount;	  
    if ( '\n' == ch ) ++lcount; // put the literalt on left
    if ( std::isspace(prev) && !std::isspace(ch) ) ++wcount;
    prev = ch;
  }
  std::cout << lcount <<" "<< wcount <<" "<< ccount <<'\n';
  return 0;
}

The program can be tested for various inputs. The output is checked against the wc Unix utility.

$ g++ -Wall -Wextra wcount.cpp -o wcount
$ ./wcount < wcount.cpp 
31 146 873
$ wc < wcount1.cpp 
 31 146 873

Later in Practice 12 this program will be further developed to accept command line arguments as filenames and write out a summary line if there were more arguments.

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