Re: character matching

[Jeffrey Carter <spam@spam.com>]

John J wrote:

> To develop a program that counts words and sentences I'm trying to
> write some code that will recognise a word due to it being a series
> of alphanumeric characters terminated by one or more of a space,
> comma, fullstop, colon, exclamation mark or question mark. I'm going
> to use a case to match the condition then perform an advance on a
> wordcounter.
> 
> I also need to include a case match that will recognise sentences by
> being a sequence of words terminated by one or more of full stop,
> exclamation mark, question mark or colon. The code also needs to be
> able to accept that there maybe spaces between the last word of the
> sentence and the terminating stop ie. "hope this works  !". I'm not
> sure on how to match these conditions and would greatly appreciate
> some assistance. My skeletion code is as follows:

This certainly sounds like a homework assignment.

A good approach to this is to consider it a state machine with 2 states: 
you're either in a word or not in a word; initially you're not in a 
word. When you're not in a word, characters that terminate a word are 
junk and leave you in the same state; characters that can be a word put 
you into the in-a-word state. When you're in a word, characters that can 
be a word leave you in the same state; characters that terminate a word 
put you into the not-in-a-word state and terminators that terminate a 
sentence can also increment the sentence count. This kind of approach 
can help you consider "Help me!!!" as one sentence rather than 3.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Ada has made you lazy and careless. You can write programs in C that
are just as safe by the simple application of super-human diligence."
E. Robert Tisdale
72