counting words

I have a new project which I would really appreciate your help with. Among the tasks of this project, I need to count the words of a text file. I don't understand why the code to count the characters works. If I did, perhaps I could figure out how to write the code that would count all the {groups of letters between the spaces} also known as {words}. Can anyone explain or help?


the piece of code I'm having trouble with is:

while (getline(InFile, S))
{
TotalChars+=S.length();
TotalLines++;
TotalWords++;
AverageWordLength=((TotalWords+TotalChars)/2);

}

the particular line that is incorrect is TotalWords++; which of course at present is returning the same value as TotalLines.

Thanks!

I'd probably throw the file into a string, split the string on spaces, and return the size of the array. Failing that, you could check to see if the current character is a space, and if it is, increment TotalWords. That seems rather less efficient, though.

I have done so, but I guess I don't know the code to use to split the string on spaces and return the size of the array. Want to see the full "program"? It's only 51 lines.

Here's an example of splitting a string using C++




You can call it like this:
Split(originalString, " ", arrayOfWords);

That middle parameter is the delimeter

From what I understand VisualC++ has a Split function built in... I haven't used it though.

I'm being asked to write a program that displays the number of words and the average word length in a text file. I've managed to write a program that displays this information when the user inputs a sentence, but not when the program is reading the text file.

Are you getting an error?

Or do you not know how to read files?
Refer to http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/tut6-1.html for help with files

Thanks that was a good tutorial...

I am just posting today to let you know what code I ended up submitting.... Perhaps posting solutions now and then will help the newcomer...

I didn't come up with how to find the average word length with it so I'll probably only get 50% credit if that.

Code:
/* Count Words program
Pre: InFile contains a a string.
Post: returns number of words and average word length of InFile */



#include <string>
#include <fstream>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

main() {

string word;
ifstream InFile;
int i = 0;

InFile.open("source.txt");

while(InFile >> word) {
i++;
}

cout <<"Total Words: "<< i << '\n';
return 0;

}


Thanks for your help everybody!