CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cubuntugetchar
royal
royal

Reputation: 1

Unable to print number of characters using getchar, in Ubuntu

I am new to C, and to Ubuntu. I wrote a very simple program to count the number of characters using while and getchar(). The program is: 

#include <stdio.h>

main()  {

    int i;
    int c= 0;

    while ( ( i = getchar() ) != EOF ){
        c++ ;
    }
    printf( "%d characters\n" , c) ;

    return 0;
}

I saved it and compiled it using gcc c1.c -o c1. No errors reported. I executed the program using ./c1 . I give the input as daniweb then I press enter, but the count is displayed. What went wrong? Is it infinite loop? How does getchar() determine EOF when input is given from keyboard?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 886

Answers (2)

Trevor Forentz
Trevor Forentz

Reputation: 147

Pressing enter sends a new line character to your program, not EOF. As others have mention already, use Ctrl+D to send EOF. If you want to stop reading characters on newline, change your while loop to this:

while ( ( i = getchar() ) != '\n' ){
c++ ;
}

Upvotes: 1

timos
timos

Reputation: 2707

On the terminal you can send EOF to an application by pressing Ctrl+D. You can also do something like this:

echo "blablub" | ./yourprogram

To count how many characters are in blablub. In this case EOF is sent automatically.

Upvotes: 1

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