C++ Counting words in a file between two words - c++

Question

I am currently trying to count the number of words in a file. After this, I plan to make it count the words between two words in the file. For example. My file may contain. "Hello my name is James". I want to count the words, so 5. And then I would like to count the number of words between "Hello" and "James", so the answer would be 3. I am having trouble with accomplishing both tasks.
Mainly due to not being exactly sure how to structure my code.
Any help on here would be greatly appreciated. The code I am currently using is using spaces to count the words.
Here is my code:
readwords.cpp
string ReadWords::getNextWord()
{
bool pWord = false;
char c;
while((c = wordfile.get()) !=EOF)
{
if (!(isspace(c)))
{
nextword.append(1, c);
}
return nextword;
}
}
bool ReadWords::isNextWord()
{
if(!wordfile.eof())
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}
main.cpp
main()
{
int count = 0;
ReadWords rw("hamlet.txt");
while(rw.isNextWord()){
rw.getNextWord();
count++;
}
cout << count;
rw.close();
}
What it does at the moment is counts the number of characters. I'm sure its just a simple fix and something silly that I'm missing. But I've been trying for long enough to go searching for some help.
Any help is greatly appreciated. :)

Answer 1

Rather than parse the file character-by-character, you can simply use istream::operator<<() to read whitespace-separated words. << returns the stream, which evaluates to true as a bool when the stream can still be read from.
vector<string> words;
string word;
while (wordfile >> word)
words.push_back(word);
There is a common formulation of this using the <iterator> and <algorithm> utilities, which is more verbose, but can be composed with other iterator algorithms:
istream_iterator<string> input(wordfile), end;
copy(input, end, back_inserter(words));
Then you have the number of words and can do with them whatever you like:
words.size()
If you want to find "Hello" and "James", use find() from the <algorithm> header to get iterators to their positions:
// Find "Hello" anywhere in 'words'.
const auto hello = find(words.begin(), words.end(), "Hello");
// Find "James" anywhere after 'hello' in 'words'.
const auto james = find(hello, words.end(), "James");
If they’re not in the vector, find() will return words.end(); ignoring error checking for the purpose of illustration, you can count the number of words between them by taking their difference, adjusting for the inclusion of "Hello" in the range:
const auto count = james - (hello + 1);
You can use operator-() here because std::vector::iterator is a “random-access iterator”. More generally, you could use std::distance() from <iterator>:
const auto count = distance(hello, james) - 1;
Which has the advantage of being more descriptive of what you’re actually doing. Also, for future reference, this kind of code:
bool f() {
if (x) {
return true;
} else {
return false;
}
}
Can be simplified to just:
bool f() {
return x;
}
Since x is already being converted to bool for the if.

Answer 2

To count:
std::ifstream infile("hamlet.txt");
std::size_t count = 0;
for (std::string word; infile >> word; ++count) { }
To count only between start and stop:
std::ifstream infile("hamlet.txt");
std::size_t count = 0;
bool active = false;
for (std::string word; infile >> word; )
{
if (!active && word == "Hello") { active = true; }
if (!active) continue;
if (word == "James") break;
++count;
}

Answer 3

I think "return nextword;" should instead be "else return nextword;" or else you are returning from the function getNextWord every time, no matter what the char is.
string ReadWords::getNextWord()
{
bool pWord = false;
char c;
while((c = wordfile.get()) !=EOF)
{
if (!(isspace(c)))
{
nextword.append(1, c);
}
else return nextword;//only returns on a space
}
}

Answer 4

To count all words:
std::ifstream f("hamlet.txt");
std::cout << std::distance (std::istream_iterator<std::string>(f),
std::istream_iterator<std::string>()) << '\n';
To count between two words:
std::ifstream f("hamlet.txt");
std::istream_iterator<std::string> it(f), end;
int count = 0;
while (std::find(it, end, "Hello") != end)
while (++it != end && *it != "James")
++count;
std::cout << count;

Answer 5

Try this:
below the line
nextword.append(1, c);
add
continue;