C Primer Plus®, Third Edition

A Word-Count Program

Now you have the tools to make a word-counting program, that is, a program that reads input and reports the number of words it finds. You may as well count characters and lines while you are at it. Let's see what such a program involves.

First, the program should read input character-by-character, and it should have some way of knowing when to stop. Second, it should be able to recognize and count the following units: characters, lines, words. Here's a pseudocode representation:

read a character
while there is more input
     increment character count
     if a line has been read, increment line count
     if a word has been read, increment word count
     read next character

You already have a model for the input loop:

 while ((ch = getchar()) ...