C++ counter not working

Question

The file I read had the string "hello" that was all. There were no errors and the program said "You have 135197296 E's" which is obviously wrong. I'm stumped here. I'm new to C++ and it looked this would be a fun and easy program to do... I was wrong.

I don't know if it matters but the completed program should be able to open a file the user provides, read the file, and put the frequencies of letters onto a separate file. Obviously, I haven't gotten there yet and I'm only asking for help on this bit :)

 int main() {
    string filenamein, filenameout;
    char character;
    ifstream fileC;
    int tletter, eletter;

    cout << "which file do you want to open?";
    cin >> filenamein;

    fileC.open(filenamein.c_str());
    if (fileC)
    {
        while (fileC)
        {
            fileC.get(character);
            char e, E;
            if (character == 'e'|| character == 'E')
            {
                eletter++;
            }
        }
    }

    cout<< "You have " << eletter <<" E's";
    fileC.close();

    return 0;
}

Answer 1

In C++, primitive variables such as int are not initialized unless you explicitly initialize them. This would generally be inefficient because sometimes you don't know the first value you want a variable to assume when you declare it, and so initializing it to, eg, 0 would be a redundant write operation.

Thus, if you want your eletter to start at 0 , you have to do something like this.

int eletter = 0;

That way you're counting from 0 . If you don't initialize it, its initial value will be whatever 4 B of garbage data happen to be in that location of your computer's RAM when you allocate the memory, which in this case was around 135 million.