Question

I made a very simple C program that is supposed to count how many characters and words are in a string (I count words by checking how many spaces are in the text and one to it). The current code is the following (with no ‘printf’s to keep it shorter):

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    int character;
    int words, characters = 0;
    while ((character = getchar()) != '\n') {
        characters = ++characters;
        if ((character == ' ') || (character == '\d')) {
            words = ++words;
        } 
    } 
    return 0;
}

My problem is that counting words do not work. I get an accurate count for characters, but words always gives me 2293576, and I cannot for the world figure out why.

Can someone solve this mystery for me?

Thank you for all your answers; I really appreciate the help.

and sorry if my primitive skills made some of your heads hurt. I am a beginner but hopefully improve fast.

Answer 1

You haven’t initialized words. Uninitialized local variables in C default to an undefined value and are not automatically initialized to zero.

The statement

int x, y = 0;

Is not the same as

int x = 0, y = 0;