Struggling with a textcounter - c++

Question

I tried to write myself a textcounter which tells me how many characters and words are in a piece of text. Every time I try to paste in a long piece of text for it to count, it will crash or display something random.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
This is what I have written:
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
cout << "Text counter\nPlease insert text.\n";
string text = "";
getline(cin, text);
double countTotal = text.size();
cout << "Total characters: " << countTotal << "\n";
int wordCount = 1;
for (int chrSearch = 0; chrSearch < (int)text.size(); chrSearch++)
{
char chr = text.at(chrSearch);
if(chr == ' ')
{
wordCount++;
}
}
cout << "Total words: " << wordCount << "\n";
return 0;
}

Answer 1

First of all, the code reads at most one line: std::getline(std::cin, line) stops reading upon receiving the first newline. You can specify a character where to stop, e.g, the character '\0' is unlikely to be present in typical text. For example, you could use:
std::string text;
if (std::getline(std::cin, text, '\0')) {
// do something with the read text
}
You should also always check that input was successful. While the above would work with short texts, when the texts become large it makes more sense to read them one line at a time and eventually reading a line will fail when the end of the stream is reached.
In case you don't like the approach of reading everything up to a null character, you could read the entire stream using code like this:
std::istreambuf_iterator<char> it(std::cin), end;
std::string text(it, end);
if (!text.empty()) {
// do something with the read text
}
A few notes on the other parts of the code:
Don't use double where you mean to use an integer. You may want to use a bigger integer, e.g., unsigned long or unsigned long long but double is for floating point values.
When iterating through a sequence you should either use an unsigned integer type when dealing with indices, e.g., unsigned int or std::size_t. This way there is no need to cast the size(). Preferably you'd use iterators:
for (auto it(text.begin()), end(text.end()); it != end; ++it) {
char chr(*it);
// ...
}
or
for (char chr: text) {
// ...
}
Note that your word count is wrong if there are two consecutive spaces. Also, if you don't break your text using line breaks, you need to use '\n' as an additional whitespace character separating words. If you want to consider all spaces, you should actually use something like this to determine if a character is a space:
if (std::isspace(static_cast<unsigned char>(chr)) { ... }
The static_cast<unsigned char>(chr) is needed because char tends to be signed and using a negative value with std::isspace() results in undefined behavior. Casting the character to unsigned char avoids any problems. Note that negative characters are not entirely uncommon: for example, the second character of my last name (the u-umlaut 'ü') normally result in a negative char, e.g., when UTF-8 or ISO-Latin-1 encoding is used.