Question

I have searched thoroughly for an answer to my problem but without much success. I was hoping someone here can help me out.
I have a simple code that reads 1 line from a file & calculates the number of characters & words in that line. I use the whitespace character to determine when a new word starts & the \n to determine when the line ends.

For some reason, the whitespace is never detected & the program goes in an infinite loop.
This happens if I initialize the buffer to \n. If I dont do that, even the \n is not detected.

Thanks in advance.

memset(&buf[0], '\n', sizeof(buf));

read(fd, &buf[0], sizeof(buf));

while(buf[i] != '\n') {      
    while(buf[i] != ' ') {
    no_of_chars++;
    i++; 
    }
      no_of_words++;
      i++;
}

Contents of the file I am reading: “This is a test file”
Compiler: GCC (Ubuntu)

Answer 1

There are two problems:

memset(&buf[0], '\n', sizeof(buf));

read(fd, &buf[0], sizeof(buf) - 1); /* else read could overwrite all your line feed chars */

while(buf[i] != '\n') {
    while(buf[i] != ' ' && buf[i] != '\n') { /* else the inner while skips line feed chars */
        no_of_chars++;
        i++;
    }
    no_of_words++;
    i++;
}