File open - counting chars: c, file, counting

File open - counting chars

Hi,
I have written a small program to gain understanding to how file opens works..
The program counts the number of characters and lines in the file...
I found it strange as in the test.txt file I had the following:
Hello
Everyone
Testing
And the number of counts of characters i got was : 26
And the number of new lines i got was: 0
Now, if i count character one by one, it is should be 20 ( 5 chars for Hello + 8 chars for Everyone and 7 chars for Testing)
Now,if i count how many new lines i got , it should be 3:

What is could go wrong :-(

int countChar(char *,int *)
int main()
{
int c;
int *lCount;
lCount=malloc(sizeof(int));
c=countChar("test.txt",lCount);

printf("The number of char counts : %d\n",c);

printf("The number of new lines : %d\n",*lCount);

return 0;

}

int countChar(char *f,int *lCount)
{
int count=0;
FILE *fp;
int ch;
fp=fopen(f,"r+");
if(fp==NULL)
return -1;

while((ch=fgetc(fp))!=EOF)
{
if(ch=='\n')
*lCount++;

count++;
}
return count;

}

Also, is there any function in C that allows to count word . i.e Hello - 1 word Everyone - 1 word
thanks

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Forget about the '\0' ... There are no '\0' in text files. The extra characters counted were all '\n' (or possibly '\r' or extra spaces or ...).

To find out which characters were read, you can write each character once you read it like this :

printf("%02x ", ch); /* <--- put this in the while loop */

If you want, you can paste your program's output here, and we can tell you why it counts 25 ...

And here's the corrected code :

int countChar(char *, int *); /* <--- you forgot a ; at the end of this line */

int main() {
int c = 0; /* <--- it's always good to initialize your variables once you declare them */
int lCount = 0; /* <--- don't make this a pointer - you don't need to (the malloc line can then go too) */
c = countChar("test.txt", &lCount); /* <--- and instead we pass the address of lCount */

printf("The number of char counts : %d\n", c);
printf("The number of new lines : %d\n", lCount); /* <--- we can simply show lCount now ... */

return 0;
}

int countChar(char *f, int *lCount) {
int count = 0;
FILE *fp = 0;
int ch = '\0';
fp = fopen(f, "r+");
if (fp == NULL)
return -1;

while ((ch = fgetc(fp)) != EOF) {
if (ch == '\n')
(*lCount)++; /* <--- see ozo's comments */
count++;
}
return count;
}

Note that I indented your code to make it better readable. I commented the modifications I made. Some are to make your life easier (like the malloc), some are to avoid bugs (like initializing the variables once they are declared), and others are to fix errors (like the fix already made by ozo).

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File open - counting chars

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C Programming Language

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