Line Breaks when reading an input file by character in C++ - c++

Ok, just to be up front, this IS homework, but it isn't due for another week, and I'm not entirely sure the final details of the assignment. Long story short, without knowing what concepts he'll introduce in class, I decided to take a crack at the assignment, but I've run into a problem. Part of what I need to do for the homework is read individual characters from an input file, and then, given the character's position within its containing word, repeat the character across the screen. The problem I'm having is, the words in the text file are single words, each on a different line in the file. Since I'm not sure we'll get to use <string> for this assignment, I was wondering if there is any way to identify the end of the line without using <string>.
Right now, I'm using a simple ifstream fin; to pull the chars out. I just can't figure out how to get it to recognize the end of one word and the beginning of another. For the sake of including code, the following is all that I've got so far. I was hoping it would display some sort of endl character, but it just prints all the words out run together style.
ifstream fin;
char charIn;
fin.open("Animals.dat");
fin >> charIn;
while(!fin.eof()){
cout << charIn;
fin >> charIn;
}
A few things I forgot to include originally:
I must process each character as it is input (my loop to print it out needs to run before I read in the next char and increase my counter). Also, the length of the words in 'Animals.dat' vary which keeps me from being able to just set a number of iterations. We also haven't covered fin.get() or .getline() so those are off limits as well.
Honestly, I can't imagine this is impossible, but given the restraints, if it is, I'm not too upset. I mostly thought it was a fun problem to sit on for a while.

Why not use an array of chars? You can try it as follow:
#define MAX_WORD_NUM 20
#define MAX_STR_LEN 40 //I think 40 is big enough to hold one word.
char words[MAX_WROD_NUM][MAX_STR_LEN];
Then you can input a word to the words.
cin >> words[i];

The >> operator ignores whitespace, so you'll never get the newline character. You can use c-strings (arrays of characters) even if the <string> class is not allowed:
ifstream fin;
char animal[64];
fin.open("Animals.dat");
while(fin >> animal) {
cout << animal << endl;
}
When reading characters from a c-string (which is what animal is above), the last character is always 0, sometimes represented '\0' or NULL. This is what you check for when iterating over characters in a word. For example:
c = animal[0];
for(int i = 1; c != 0 && i < 64; i++)
{
// do something with c
c = animal[i];
}

Related

Reading text from standard input till meeting one of exact characters, saving it, then continuing reading until end of line

I want to deal with basic operations (+, -, *, /) on big numbers. My standard input line will look like 12345678987654322+12334675432142654765786.
So I want to read first number into one string variable, then sign of operation into another variable and then to continue reading until end of line.
I was thinking about something like this, but it just skips "+" and I have no idea how to include 4 conditions here (+, -, *, /).
std::string firstNumber;
std::string secondNumber;
std::getline(std::cin, firstNumber, '+');
std::getline(std::cin, secondNumber);
Read the whole line into a string.
Loop over the string and extract character by character. As long as the character is a digit, put it into the first "number" variable. If it's a non-digit, then check if it's a valid operator, and report failure if it isn't. Extract the second number, character by character, into the second "number" variable.
This way you can more easily detect errors, and also handle spaces between the numbers and the operator.
You can (and I recommend that you do) put the number-extraction into a separate function so you don't have to duplicate the code for it.
You need to do some work instead of relying on standard functions to do the work for you. What you want can easily be accomplished by reading one character at a time and using a couple of loops
#include <cctype>
#include <string>
#include <iostream>
std::string firstNumber, secondNumber;
char operation, ch;
ch = std::cin.get();
while (isdigit((unsigned char)ch))
{
firstNumber += ch;
ch = std::cin.get();
}
operation = std::cin.get();
ch = std::cin.get();
while (isdigit((unsigned char)ch))
{
secondNumber += ch;
ch = std::cin.get();
}
This code does no error checking at all, which in a real world program would be a serious problem.
What you are being asked to do is a parsing problem. It's a very common thing to do and there is lots and lots of literature on different ways to do parsing.

String Management C/C++ & Writing and Reading From txt File

I am facing a problem with reading and writing a string from and to a file respectively.
Purpose:
To enter a string into a text file as a complete sentence, read the string from the text file and separate all words that start from a vowel using a function and display them as a sentence. (The sentence just needs to consist of the words from the string that start with a vowel.)
Problem:
The code is working as intended but as i have used the getline() function to obtain the string from the txt file when i withdraw a substring from it, it includes the entire file after the vowel instead of just the word. I cannot understand how to make the substring only include words.
Code:
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
#include <iostream>
#include <cstring>
using namespace std;
string vowels(string a)
{
int c=sizeof(a);
string b[c];
string d;
static int n;
for(int i=1;i<=c;i++)
{
if (a.find("a")!=-1)
{
b[i]=a.substr(a.find("a",n));
d+=b[i];
n=a.find("a")+1;
}
else if (a.find("e")!=-1)
{
b[i]=a.substr(a.find("e",n));
d+=b[i];
n=a.find("e")+1;
}
else if (a.find("i")!=-1)
{
b[i]=a.substr(a.find("i",n));
d+=b[i];
n=a.find("i")+1;
}
else if (a.find("o")!=-1)
{
b[i]=a.substr(a.find("o",n));
d+=b[i];
n=a.find("o")+1;
}
else if (a.find("u")!=-1)
{
b[i]=a.substr(a.find("u",n));
d+=b[i];
n=a.find("u")+1;
}
}
return d;
}
int main()
{
string input,lne,e;
ofstream file("output.txt", ios::app);
cout<<"Please input text for text file input: ";
getline(cin,input);
file << input;
file.close();
ifstream myfile("output.txt");
getline(myfile,lne);
e=vowels(lne);
cout<<endl<<"Text inside file reads: ";
cout<<lne;
cout<<endl;
cout<<e<<endl;
system("pause");
myfile.close();
return 0;
}
I haven't read your code VERY carefully, but several things stand out:
Look up find_first_of - it'll simplify your code A LOT.
sizeof(a) certainly doesn't do what you think it does [unless you think it gives you the size of the std::string class type - which makes it rather strange as a use-case, why not use either 12 or 24?]
find (and find_first_of), technically speaking, doesn't return -1 when the function isn't finding what you want. It returns std::string::npos [which may appear to be -1, but a) is not guaranteed to be, and b) is unsingned so can't be negative].
Your program only reads one line.
x.substr(n) will give you the string of x from position n - is that what you want?
Don't repeat find, use p = x.find("X"); and then do x.substr(p) [assuming that is what you want].
There are various problems with your code.
int c = sizeof( a );
This is the number of bytes that a string takes up in memory. And you certainly don't want to create an array of this many strings as it makes no sense for what you're trying to achieve. Don't do this to yourself. You're only copying one string inside the loop, all you need is one string and you already have string d.
To get the actual size of a string, you have to call
str.size()
The string.substr(..) has a couple overloads, one of them takes only one argument, an index. This will return sub string starting at that index in the original string. (The string starting at the vowel all the way through to the end of the string)
What you are maybe looking for is the overload that takes two arguments, the start index (beginning of the word and the end of the word).
The string input will not take the newline that you enter to flush cin. And then you add it to the file in append mode, so after running the program a few times your file is a huge one-liner. Did you really intend to do this?
Maybe you should explicitly add a new line to the file after entering the input. Something like file << std::endl;
Also, the conditions in the ifs
if (a.find("a")!=-1)
Don't match what you do next,
b[i]=a.substr(a.find("a",n));
Then you use a static int,
static int n;
This is bad, because this function will only work once. You're lucky that static initializes its values to zero, but you should always initialize explicitly. In your case, you don't need this to be static.
Finally: "so i was unsure of how many loops to run"
When you don't know how many loops you have to run, then a for loop is not adequate.
You should use a while loop or a do while.
You shouldn't try to learn C++ by guessing, because that's what it looks like you're doing. You're trying to do more than you know and making some very silly mistakes. Find a good book to learn from, or at the very least google the functions you're using to see what they do and how to use them properly. (ie: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/string/string/substr/ )
Here's a list of books from stackoverflow's FAQ: The Definitive C++ Book Guide and List
The last thing is about finding vowels. When you find a vowel, you have to make sure it's at the beginning of a word. Then you want to read it until the word ends, that is when you find a character that is not part of a word. (a whitespace, certain punctuation, ... ) This should mark the beginning and end of the word.

Difference between cin and cin.get() for char array

I have these 2 codes:
char a[256];
cin>>a;
cout<<a;
and
char a[256];
cin.get(a,256);cin.get();
cout<<a;
and maybe, relative to the second one without cin.get();
char a[256];
cin.get(a,256);
cout<<a;
My question is (first one) : for a char array, what should i use? cin or cin.get()? And why should i use cin.get(); with no parameter after my char initialisation?
And my second question is: my c++ teacher taught me to use every time cin.get() for initialisation chars and AFTER every initialisation char array or int array or just int or whatever, to again put cin.get(); after it. That's what i wanted to ask initially.
So, now i got these 2:
In this case, without cin.get() after the integer initialisation, my program will break and i can't do anymore my char initialisation.
int n;
cin>>n;
char a[256];
cin.get(a,256); cin.get(); // with or without cin.get();?
cout<<a;
And the correct one:
int n;
cin>>n; cin.get();
char a[256];
cin.get(a,256); cin.get(); // again, with or without?
cout<<a;
So, what's the matter? Please someone explain for every case ! Thank you.
They do different things, so choose whichever does what you want, or the better alternatives given below.
The first cin>>a; reads a single word, skipping over any leading space characters, and stopping when it encounters a space character (which includes the end of the line).
The second cin.get(a,256);cin.get(); reads a whole line, then consumes the end-of-line character so that repeating this will read the next line. cin.getline(a,256) is a slightly neater way to do this.
The third cin.get(a,256) reads a whole line but leaves the end-of-line character in the stream, so that repeating this will give no more input.
In each case, you'll get some kind of ill behaviour if the input word/line is longer than the fixed-size buffer. For that reason, you should usually use a friendlier string type:
std::string a;
std::cin >> a; // single word
std::getline(std::cin, a); // whole line
The string will grow to accommodate any amount of input.
The problem, most likely, is in the way you enter the values later on. The cin.get() after every initialization is there to "grab" the newline character that gets put in the stream every time you press enter.
Say you start entering your values like this:
2
a b c d...
Assuming you have pressed enter after 2, the newline character was also put on the stream. When you call cin.get() after that, it will grab and discard the newline character, allowing the rest of your code to properly get the input.
To answer your first question, for an array, you should use cin.get instead of the overloaded operator >> cin>> as that would only grab a single word, and it would not limit the amount of characters grabbed, which could lead to an overflow and data corruptions / program crashing.
On the other hand, cin.get() allows you to specify the maximum number of characters read, preventing such bugs.
For a char array use cin.get() because it counts whitespace whereas cin does not. More importantly, cin.get() sets the maximum number of characters to read. For example:
char foo[25]; //set maximum number of characters
cout << "Please type in characters for foo" << endl;
cin.get(foo,25);
cout << ' ' << foo;
In this case, you can only type in 24 characters and a null terminator character \0.
I hope this answers your first question.
I would personally use a string.

Count the number of unique words and occurrence of each word

CSCI-15 Assignment #2, String processing. (60 points) Due 9/23/13
You MAY NOT use C++ string objects for anything in this program.
Write a C++ program that reads lines of text from a file using the ifstream getline() method, tokenizes the lines into words ("tokens") using strtok(), and keeps statistics on the data in the file. Your input and output file names will be supplied to your program on the command line, which you will access using argc and argv[].
You need to count the total number of words, the number of unique words, the count of each individual word, and the number of lines. Also, remember and print the longest and shortest words in the file. If there is a tie for longest or shortest word, you may resolve the tie in any consistent manner (e.g., use either the first one or the last one found, but use the same method for both longest and shortest). You may assume the lines comprise words (contiguous lower-case letters [a-z]) separated by spaces, terminated with a period. You may ignore the possibility of other punctuation marks, including possessives or contractions, like in "Jim's house". Lines before the last one in the file will have a newline ('\n') after the period. In your data files, omit the '\n' on the last line. You may assume that the lines will be no longer than 100 characters, the individual words will be no longer than 15 letters and there will be no more than 100 unique words in the file.
Read the lines from the input file, and echo-print them to the output file. After reaching end-of-file on the input file (or reading a line of length zero, which you should treat as the end of the input data), print the words with their occurrence counts, one word/count pair per line, and the collected statistics to the output file. You will also need to create other test files of your own. Also, your program must work correctly with an EMPTY input file – which has NO statistics.
Test file looks like this (exactly 4 lines, with NO NEWLINE on the last line):
the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.
all i want for christmas is my two front teeth.
the quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
Copy and paste this into a small file for one of your tests.
Hints:
Use a 2-dimensional array of char, 100 rows by 16 columns (why not 15?), to hold the unique words, and a 1-dimensional array of ints with 100 elements to hold the associated counts. For each word, scan through the occupied lines in the array for a match (use strcmp()), and if you find a match, increment the associated count, otherwise (you got past the last word), add the word to the table and set its count to 1.
The separate longest word and the shortest word need to be saved off in their own C-strings. (Why can't you just keep a pointer to them in the tokenized data?)
Remember – put NO NEWLINE at the end of the last line, or your test for end-of-file might not work correctly. (This may cause the program to read a zero-length line before seeing end-of-file.)
This is not a long program – no more than about 2 pages of code
Here is what I have so far:
#include<iostream>
#include<iomanip>
#include<fstream>
#include<string>
#include<cstring>
using namespace std;
void totalwordCount(ifstream &inputFile)
{
char words[100][16]; // Holds the unique words.
char *token;
int totalCount = 0; // Counts the total number of words.
// Read every word in the file.
while(inputFile >> words[99])
{
totalCount++; // Increment the total number of words.
// Tokenize each word and remove spaces, periods, and newlines.
token = strtok(words[99], " .\n");
while(token != NULL)
{
token = strtok(NULL, " .\n");
}
}
cout << "Total number of words in file: " << totalCount << endl;
}
void uniquewordCount(ifstream &inputFile)
{
char words[100][16]; // Holds the unique words
int counter[100];
char *tok = "0";
int uniqueCount = 0; // Counts the total number of unique words
while(!inputFile.eof())
{
uniqueCount++;
tok = strtok(words[99], " .\n");
while(tok != NULL)
{
tok = strtok(NULL, " .\n");
inputFile >> words[99];
if(strcmp(tok, words[99]) == 0)
{
counter[99]++;
}
else
{
words[99][15] += 1;
}
uniqueCount++;
}
}
cout << counter[99] << endl;
}
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
ifstream inputFile;
char inFile[12] = "string1.txt";
char outFile[16] = "word result.txt";
// Get the name of the file from the user.
cout << "Enter the name of the file: ";
cin >> inFile;
// Open the input file.
inputFile.open(inFile);
// If successfully opened, process the data.
if(inputFile)
{
while(!inputFile.eof())
{
totalwordCount(inputFile);
uniquewordCount(inputFile);
}
}
return 0;
}
I already took care of how to count the total number of words in the file in the totalwordCount() function, but in the uniquewordCount() function, I am having trouble counting the total number of unique words and counting the number of occurrences of each word. Is there anything that I need to change in the uniquewordCount() function?
This program contains several issues which are to be considered harmful! To prevent bad software being created based on entirely nonsensical assignments like the above, here are a number of hints:
Always test the stream for success after reading from it. Using in.eof() to determine if the stream is in a good state does not work! One of the problems is that you will get an infinite loop if the stream goes bad for a different reason than end of file, e.g., failure to correctly parse a value (this will set std::ios_base::failbit but not std::ios_base::eofbit.
Reading to a fixed size char array a using in >> a without having set up limits for the number of characters to be read is the C++ way to spell gets()! If you really think that using in >> a is the right way to (see next item), you absolutely need to set up the array's width, e.g., using in >> std::setw(sizeof(a)) >> a. You still need to check that this extraction was successful, of course.
From the looks of it, your teacher wants you to actually use std::istream::getline() to read the array, e.g., using in.getline(a, sizeof(a)) (which, of course, needs to be checked for success).
Note that the formatted input, i.e., in >> a already tokenizes the stream being received by spaces! There is no need to faff about with strtok() after that.
Once you have consumed a stream, it is consumed. Assuming the characters don't come from a file but rather from something like standard input, you also can't rewind the stream to read it again. I'd think you want to tokenize the values once and use them for both purposes.
This is more of a sidenote: after you created a stream, its nature should be entirely immaterial for the processing of the stream's content (although, e.g., for string streams you might want to eventually collect the result using the str() member): implement your stream processing functions in terms of std::istream rather than std::ifstream!
Since you have a concrete question ("Is there anything that I need to change in the uniquewordCount() function?"): yes, everything! Throw away this function entirely and rethink what you need to do. Basically, the structure of the functionality should be along the lines of
char buffer[100];
while (in.getline(buffer, sizeof(buffer))) {
// tokenize buffer into words
// for each word check if it already exists
// if the word does not exist, append it to the array of known words and set count to 1
// if the word exists, increment the count
// determine if the word is shorter or longer than the shortest or longest word so far
// if it is the case, remember the word's index or a pointer to it
}

C++: Why does space always terminate a string when read?

Using type std::string to accept a sentence, for practice (I haven't worked with strings in C++ much) I'm checking if a character is a vowel or not. I got this:
for(i = 0; i <= analyse.length(); i++) {
if(analyse[i] == 'a' || analyse[i] == 'e' [..etc..]) {
...vowels++;
} else { ...
...consonants++;
}
This works fine if the string is all one word, but the second I add a space (IE: aeio aatest) it will only count the first block and count the space as a consonant, and quit reading the sentence (exiting the for loop or something).
Does a space count as no character == null? Or some oddity with std::string?, It would be helpful to know why that is happening!
EDIT:
I'm simply accepting the string through std::cin, such as:
std::string analyse = "";
std::cin >> analyse;
I'd guess you're reading your string with something like your_stream >> your_string;. Operator >> for strings is defined to work (about) the same as scanf's %s conversion, which reads up until it encounters whitespace -- therefore, operator>> does the same.
You can read an entire line of input instead with std::getline. You might also want to look at an answer I posted to a previous question (provides some alternatives to std::getline).
I can't tell from the code that you have pasted, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you're reading into the string using the stream extraction operator (stream >> string).
The stream extraction operator stops when it encounters whitespace.
If this isn't what's going on, can you show us how you're populating your string, and what its contents are?
If I'm right, then you're going to want a different method of reading content into the string. std::getline() is probably the easiest method of reading from a file. It stops at newlines instead of at whitespace.
Edit based on edited question:
use this (doublecheck the syntax. I'm not in front of my compiler.):
std::getline(std::cin, analyze);
This ought to stop reading when you press "enter".
If you want to read in an entire line (including the blanks) then you should read using getline. Schematically it looks like this:
#include <string>
istream& std::getline( istream& is, string& s );
To read the whole line you do something like this:
string s;
getline( cin, s );
cout << "You entered " << s << endl;
PS: the word is "consonant", not "consenent".
The >> operator on an istream separates strings on whitespace. If you want to get a whole line, you can use readline(cin,destination_string).