[SOLVED] print # of characters in C

[rubing]

I am following along with exercises from a book (C Programming), and one of the examples doesn't seem to be working.  I believe it's supposed to print the number of characters you enter, but it doesn't do anything.  Is there something wrong with my code?

 

#include <stdio.h>
main()
{
  long nc;

  nc=0;

  while (getchar() != EOF) 
    ++nc;

  printf("%ld\n",nc);
}

[corbin]

A book really had that as an example?  Weird.

 

 

 

#define EOF    (-1)

 

Is what stdio.h has for me, and I would assume it is the same with all versions of stdio.

 

 

That said, when comparing a character to an integer, it compares the numeric equivalent of the character (for example, if the encoding is ASCII, 'a' == 97).  No character encoding that I know of uses -1, so entering that wouldn't exactly be possible.

 

 

Perhaps you could change the code to check for a line break or a period?

 

 

while(getchar() != '.') for example....

 

 

(Single quotes are used because double quotes would make it a null terminated char array.  In other words, it would be \2E\00 instead of \2E (hex representation), and of course a single character (as returned from getchar()) will never match a null terminated char array.)