Question

I’m writing a program that deciphers sentences, syllables, and words given in a basic text file.

The program cycles through the file character by character.
It first looks if it is some kind of end-of-sentence marker, like ! ? : ; or ..
Then if the character is not a space or tab, it assumes it is a character.
Finally, it identifies that if it is a space or tab, and the last character before it was a valid letter/character (e.g. not an end-of-sentence marker), it is a word.

I was a bit light on the details, but here is the problem I have.
My word count is equal to my sentence count. What this interprets to, is it realizes that a word stops when there is an end of sentence marker, BUT the real problem is the spaces are considered valid letters.

Heres my if statement, to decide if the character in question is a valid letter in a word:

else if(character != ' ' || character != '\t')

I’ve already ruled out end-of-sentence markers by that point in the program. (In the original if actually). From reading off an Ascii table, 32 should be the space character.
However, when i output all of the characters that make it into that block of code, spaces are in there.

So what am I doing wrong? How can i stop spaces from getting through this if?

Thanks in advance, and I have a feeling the question may be a bit vague, or poorly worded. If you have any questions or need clarification, let me know.

Answer 1

I note that

(character != 32 || character != 9)

is always true. because if the character is 32 it is not 9, and true OR false is true…

You probably mean

(character != ' ' && character != '\t')