Using a tokenizer in C++ from a file? - c++

Question

I am working on an assignment that requires me to read in several lines of text from a file, and at the end use qsort to sort the words used alphabetically and display a count of how many times each word was used. I realized I'm going to have to tokenize the strings as they are read in from the file. The only problem is that the individual tokens kind of disappear after you do it so I have to add them to a list. I'm bad at explaining, so here's my code:
#include<iostream>
#include<string>
#include<algorithm>
#include<stdlib.h>
#include<fstream>
using namespace std;
int compare(const void* , const void*);
const int SIZE = 1000;
const int WORD_SIZE = 256;
void main()
{
cout << "This program is designed to alphabetize words entered from a file." << endl;
cout << "It will then display this list with the number of times " << endl;
cout << "that each word was entered." << endl;
cout << endl;
char *words[SIZE];//[WORD_SIZE];
char temp[100];
char *tokenPtr, *nullPtr= NULL;
char *list[SIZE];
string word;
int i = 0, b = 0;
ifstream from_file;
from_file.open("prob1.txt.txt");
if (!from_file)
{
cout << "Cannot open file - prob1.txt";
exit(1); //exits program
}
while (!from_file.eof())
{
from_file.getline(temp, 99);
tokenPtr = strtok(temp, " ");
while (tokenPtr != NULL)
{
cout << tokenPtr << '\n';
list[b] = tokenPtr;
b++;
tokenPtr = strtok(nullPtr, " ");
}
word = temp;
transform(word.begin(), word.end(), word.begin(), ::tolower);
words[i] = list[i];
i++;
}
from_file.close();
qsort(words, i, WORD_SIZE, compare);
int currentcount = 1 ;
int k;
for( int s = 0; s < i; s++ )
{
for( k = 1; k <= s; k++)
{
if( words[s] == words[k] )
{
currentcount++;
}
currentcount = 1;
words[k] = "";
}
cout << words[s] << " is listed: " << currentcount << " times." << endl;
words[s] = "";
}
}
int compare(const void* p1, const void *p2)
{
char char1, char2;
char1 = *(char *)p1; // cast from pointer to void
char2 = *(char *)p2; // to pointer to int
if(char1 < char2)
return -1;
else
if (char1 == char2)
return 0;
else
return 1;
}
The only thing missing is the compare function, but the program works fine, up until the qsort, wherein it crashes, but it doesn't tell me why. Can anybody shed some insight/help me fix this up?
Again, this IS an assignment. (I was told I need to specify this?)

Answer 1

The array words is an array of pointers to char:
char* words[SIZE]; // SIZE elements of type `char*`
So the third parameter WIDTH should be the width of a pointer to char.
qsort(words, i, sizeof(char*), compare);
Also your implementation of compare is not working as you expect.
You are passing pointers to the compare. But they are pointers at the elements. You need to de-reference the pointers to get the values:
int compare(const void* p1, const void *p2)
{
char const* x = *(char**)p1;
char const* y = *(char**)p2;
This does not compare strings:
if( words[s] == words[k] )
This just compares two pointers. To compare the strings they point at use strcmp()
if( strcmp(words[s], words[k]) == 0)
This should stop the crashes, but there is a lot more improvements to this code we can do:
Once you get it working you should post it here https://codereview.stackexchange.com/ for a review.