C++ By Example: UnderC Learning Edition

Case Study: Histograms

Suppose that you are presented with a large body of text. Is it possible to tell interesting things about the authors from the typical length of their sentences, their words, and so on? Some literary detectives think so; in this case study, your job is to collect these statistics and present them as a bar graph, otherwise known as a histogram. You already have one tool for the job—C++ input streams, which read in strings separated by spaces. C++ input streams are well suited to this task because they are not line based; text is naturally parsed into tokens, which are usually (but not always) words. For example, "He said, let's go." is read as {"He" "said," "let's" "go."}. So when you read in a token, you need to look at ...