Reading from a redirected stdin (wordcount) - C

Question

I have this text file called "input.txt" which contains:

test line one
test line two
final line

After compiling and running via

$ ./a.exe < input.txt

I get the output:

33 8 0

I'm confused as to why the line count doesn't work as when I print out the integer values, 13 and 10 (carriage return/line feed) are shown. Also charcount is two over the actual count. Any ideas?

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <stdlib.h>

    int main(void) { 
        int charcount = 0, wordcount = 0, linecount = 0; 
        int c = getchar();    

        while (c != EOF){
            if (c == 13){
                linecount++;
                c = getchar();
            } else if (c >= 65 && c <= 90 || c >= 97 && c <= 122 || c == 39 && c != 13) {  
                while (c >= 65 && c <= 90 || c >= 97 && c <= 122 || c == 39 && c != 13){
                    charcount++;                
                    c = getchar();
                }
                wordcount++;
            } else {
                charcount++;
            }
            c = getchar(); 
        }

        printf("%lu %lu %lu\n", charcount, wordcount, linecount);

        return (0);
    }

Answer 1

When a text file on Windows is processed in C, the CRLF line endings are mapped to '\\n' (newline) only endings. And '\\n' is 10 ( Control-J ) and not 13 ( Control-M ). That's probably why you're seeing 0 for the line count.

You should not be coding the conditions as you did (unless you've got a sadistic teacher who tells you to do it like that). Use the <ctype.h> and isalpha() (and c == '\\'' instead of 39 ).

You could debug by adding a print statement ( printf("^M read\\n"); ) in the if (c == 13) code.