Splitting sentences and placing in vector - c++

Question

I was given a code from my professor that takes multiple lines of input. I am currently changing the code for our current assignment and I came across an issue. The code is meant to take strings of input and separate them into sentences from periods and put those strings into a vector.
vector<string> words;
string getInput() {
string s = ""; // string to return
bool cont = true; // loop control.. continue is true
while (cont){ // while continue
string l; // string to hold a line
cin >> l; // get line
char lastChar = l.at(l.size()-1);
if(lastChar=='.') {
l = l.substr(0, l.size()-1);
if(l.size()>0){
words.push_back(s);
s = "";
}
}
if (lastChar==';') { // use ';' to stop input
l = l.substr(0, l.size()-1);
if (l.size()>0)
s = s + " " + l;
cont = false; // set loop control to stop
}
else
s = s + " " + l; // add line to string to return
// add a blank space to prevent
// making a new word from last
// word in string and first word
// in line
}
return s;
}
int main()
{
cout << "Input something: ";
string s = getInput();
cout << "Your input: " << s << "\n" << endl;
for(int i=0; i<words.size(); i++){
cout << words[i] << "\n";
}
}
The code puts strings into a vector but takes the last word of the sentence and attaches it to the next string and I cannot seem to understand why.

Answer 1

This line
s = s + " " + l;
will always execute, except for the end of input, even if the last character is '.'. You are most likely missing an else between the two if-s.

Answer 2

You have:
string l; // string to hold a line
cin >> l; // get line
The last line does not read a line unless the entire line has non-white space characters. To read a line of text, use:
std::getline(std::cin, l);
It's hard telling whether that is tripping your code up since you haven't posted any sample input.

Answer 3

I would at least consider doing this job somewhat differently. Right now, you're reading a word at a time, then putting the words back together until you get to a period.
One possible alternative would be to use std::getline to read input until you get to a period, and put the whole string into the vector at once. Code to do the job this way could look something like this:
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <algorithm>
#include <vector>
#include <iterator>
int main() {
std::vector<std::string> s;
std::string temp;
while (std::getline(std::cin, temp, '.'))
s.push_back(temp);
std::transform(s.begin(), s.end(),
std::ostream_iterator<std::string>(std::cout, ".\n"),
[](std::string const &s) { return s.substr(s.find_first_not_of(" \t\n")); });
}
This does behave differently in one circumstance--if you have a period somewhere other than at the end of a word, the original code will ignore that period (won't treat it as the end of a sentence) but this will. The obvious place this would make a difference would be if the input contained a number with a decimal point (e.g., 1.234), which this would break at the decimal point, so it would treat the 1 as the end of one sentence, and the 234 as the beginning of another. If, however, you don't need to deal with that type of input, this can simplify the code considerably.
If the sentences might contain decimal points, then I'd probably write the code more like this:
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <algorithm>
#include <vector>
#include <iterator>
class sentence {
std::string data;
public:
friend std::istream &operator>>(std::istream &is, sentence &s) {
std::string temp, word;
while (is >> word) {
temp += word + ' ';
if (word.back() == '.')
break;
}
s.data = temp;
return is;
}
operator std::string() const { return data; }
};
int main() {
std::copy(std::istream_iterator<sentence>(std::cin),
std::istream_iterator<sentence>(),
std::ostream_iterator<std::string>(std::cout, "\n"));
}
Although somewhat longer and more complex, at least to me it still seems (considerably) simpler than the code in the question. I guess it's different in one way--it detects the end of the input by...detecting the end of the input, rather than depending on the input to contain a special delimiter to mark the end of the input. If you're running it interactively, you'll typically need to use a special key combination to signal the end of input (e.g., Ctrl+D on Linux/Unix, or F6 on Windows).
In any case, it's probably worth considering a fundamental difference between this code and the code in the question: this defines a sentence as a type, where the original code just leaves everything as strings, and manipulates strings. This defines an operator>> for a sentence, that reads a sentence from a stream as we want it read. This gives us a type we can manipulate as an object. Since it's like a string in other ways, we provide a conversion to string so once you're done reading one from a stream, you can just treat it as a string. Having done that, we can (for example) use a standard algorithm to read sentences from standard input, and write them to standard output, with a new-line after each to separate them.