Counting the number of letters/digits

crackedice (8)
My goal is to write a C++ program that can read a text file and:

* Count the average number of letters/sentence.
* Count the total amount of digits.

The text file would be read with command "./a.out < textfile"

What I've tried so far is to have the program check each character at a time with "cin >> current". I have a while loop. If current hits a punctuation mark, it should increase linecount by 1. It should also be reading for alpha characters, but I'm not sure how to make it count those.

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#include <iostream>
#include <iomanip>
#include <cmath>
#include <cctype>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
  int letters; //Total number of letters per sentence                                                                                                                              
  int digits; //Total number of digits                                                                                                                                             
  int sentencecount; //Number of sentences                                                                                                                                         
  float averageletters; //Average number of letters per sentence                                                                                                                   
  int linecount ; //Count of lines                                                                                                                                                 
  char current; //Current character                                                                                                                                                

  cin >> current;

  digits = 0;
  letters = 0;
while (cin)
    {
      if (current == '.' == '!' == '?')
          linecount++;
          //calcuate averages and other sentence data                                                                                                                              
          //reset sentence data                                                                                                                                                    
          if (isalpha(current))//repeat for digits                                                                                                                                 
        letters++;
          cout << "line #" << letters << endl;
        cin >> current;
    }                                                          

  return 0;
}
Marcus Aseth (113)
cin.unsetf(ios::skipws);
or something like that.

Also take a look at the header <cctype>
Last edited on
icy1 (596)
You can use what I call a "frequency hash" to count the frequency of every character in a string and then perform statistics analysis on that.

This can be as simple as 
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void freq(std::map<char, int>& m, char c)
{
    // Here you can add logic to ignore certain characters, lowercase everything, etc.
    m[c] += 1;
}


If the character exists in the map, its count will be incremented by one. If it doesn't exist, the value gets auto-initialized to 0, and then incremented. The slightly safer version to check for a key is to use 'count' -- if (m.count(c) == 0) m[c] = 1;

Working code in action, using an article from the BBC that I just googled. A few characters are apparently not printable (maybe they're the unicode european apostrophes?), but should otherwise work as expected: https://repl.it/repls/WoefulSarcasticHertz
Last edited on
Cubbi (4774)
icy1 wrote:
A few characters are apparently not printable (maybe they're the unicode european apostrophes?)

fixed it for you: https://wandbox.org/permlink/r4AVgH9e82gPM6jd
Last edited on
SamuelAdams (1535)
How do you propose to
Count the average number of letters
?
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