C Program to Count Total Number of Words in a Text File

Introduction

In this article, we will explore a C program to count total number of words in a text file.

In the world of programming, there are various tasks that can be accomplished with the help of C programming language.

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One such task is counting the total number of words in a text file.

This may seem like a simple task, but it can be quite challenging if you don’t have the right knowledge and tools at your disposal.

So, let’s dive in and discover how this program works!

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C Program to Count Total Number of Words in a Text File

Problem Statement

Before we begin, let’s define the problem statement clearly. We want to write a C program that reads a text file and counts the total number of words present in it.

The program should consider any sequence of characters separated by spaces or punctuation marks as a word.

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Approach

To solve this problem, we can follow a step-by-step approach:

1. Open the text file in read mode.
2. Initialize a counter variable to keep track of the number of words.
3. Read the file character by character.
4. Whenever we encounter a space or a punctuation mark, increment the counter variable.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until the end of the file is reached.
6. Close the file.
7. Print the total number of words counted.

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Implementation

Let’s take a look at the implementation of the C program to count the total number of words in a text file:

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    FILE *file;
    char ch;
    int words = 0;

    // Open the text file in read mode
    file = fopen("text_file.txt", "r");

    // Check if the file exists
    if (file == NULL) {
        printf("Unable to open the file.\n");
        return 0;
    }

    // Read the file character by character
    while ((ch = fgetc(file)) != EOF) {
        // Increment the counter variable when encountering a space or punctuation mark
        if (ch == ' ' || ch == '\n' || ch == '\t' || ch == ',' || ch == ';' || ch == '.') {
            words++;
        }
    }

    // Close the file
    fclose(file);

    printf("Total number of words in the text file: %d\n", words);

    return 0;
}

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Explanation

Let’s go through the steps involved in this program:

1. We start by including the necessary header files, including stdio.h, which provides functions for file input/output operations.
2. Inside the main() function, we declare a file pointer file, a character variable ch, and an integer variable words to store the count of words.
3. We open the text file using the fopen() function with the file name and mode set to “r” for reading.
4. We check if the file exists by comparing the file pointer to NULL. If the file doesn’t exist or there is an error in opening the file, we display an error message and return from the program.
5. We use a while loop to read the file character by character until the end of the file is reached (EOF stands for “End of File”).
6. Inside the loop, we check if the current character is a space, newline character, tab, comma, semicolon, or period. If it is, we increment the words counter.
7. After reading the entire file, we close it using the fclose() function to free up system resources.
8. Finally, we display the total number of words counted.

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FAQs

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Conclusion

In this article, we explored a C program that counts the total number of words in a text file.

We discussed the problem statement, the approach, and the implementation details of the program.

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Additionally, we provided answers to frequently asked questions to clarify various aspects of the program.

Now, armed with this knowledge, you can easily count the number of words in any text file using the C programming language.