Java: Word Counter

[chili5]

This program is a solution to this problem: http://uva.onlinejudge.org/external/4/494.pdf. The basic idea is given a sentence, you want to find out how many words are in the sentence.

Lots of examples online that I have found say to count the number of spaces. Though this isn't correct.

Consider this input:

Hi ... test

Counting the spaces would say that there is 3 words. This is wrong. There is only 2. The ... doesn't count. Words can only consist of letters (upper and lower case), dashes and apostrophe's.

The first thing my algorithm done is remove trailing white space, and all amounts of white space are replaced with just one space. Though this doesn't really matter very much. I also remove all numbers and characters that cannot be part of a word.

Now what I do is move along the string until I find a character that is not part of a word. A space indicates the termination of a word. At this point, we count the word. Then we move along until we either find the end of the string or a letter starting the next word.

Notice though that counting spaces can't work. Why consider this:

Hi '' test.

Counting the spaces will give us 3 words. This is wrong because '' isn't a valid word.

import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;
public class wordCount {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        Scanner fin = new Scanner(new FileReader("wordCount.txt"));
        //Scanner fin = new Scanner(System.in);
        String sLine = "";
        int i = 0;
        int words = 0; // number of words

        while (fin.hasNext()) {
            words = 0;
            i = 0;
            sLine = fin.nextLine();
            // words can only contain letters, single quotes, and dashes
            // so remove everything else
            sLine = sLine.replaceAll("[^A-Za-z\'-]", " ").trim();
            // remove everything except for space
            sLine = sLine.replaceAll("\\s{1,}", " ");
            while (i < sLine.length()) {
                // keep increasing i until you find the end of the word
                // or the end of the string
                while (i < sLine.length() && (Character.isLetter(sLine.charAt(i))
                        || sLine.charAt(i) == '-' || sLine.charAt(i) == '\'')) {
                    i++;
                }
                words++; // count the word
                // keep increasing i until you find the next word
                while (i < sLine.length() && !Character.isLetter(sLine.charAt(i))) {
                    i++;
                }
            }
            System.out.println(words);
        }
        fin.close();
    }
}

[Sinipull]

You should write it as a function, so it could be easily integrated into a program. Anyway, i tried it too, i hope you don't mind if i add it here.

    public static int count(String s){    	    	
    	for(int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++){
    		if(!(checkChar(s.substring(i, i+1)) || checkApostrophesDashes(s.substring(i, i+1)))){    			
    			s = s.replace(s.substring(i, i+1), " ");
    		}    		
    	}
    	String str[] = s.split(" ");    	
    	int count = 0;
    	for(int i =0; i <str.length; i++){
    		if(!str[i].equals("") && !checkApostrophesDashes(str[i])) count++;
    	}
    	return count;
    }
    
    public static boolean checkChar(String c){ // expecting only 1 character
    	if(!c.toUpperCase().equals(c) || !c.toLowerCase().equals(c)) return true; // it's a char
    	else return false; // it's not a char
    }
    
    public static boolean checkApostrophesDashes(String c){ // expecting only 1 character
    	if(c.equals("'") || c.equals("-")) return true; // it's dash or apostrophe
    	else return false;
    }

[chili5]

That is true, I should have written it as a function. Nope, I don't really mind. The more approaches the better. Your code is much more concise than mine is.

The reason, that I didn't use methods is in a contest situation, you want to get it done as quick as you possibly can. So I didn't bother doing it with any method calls.

Very nice code though.