Weird Behavior in C For Loop

[JamesTheFolf]

This program is designed to count how many vowels are in the words the user input, and the program ends when the user does CNTR+D. For some reason the last time the loop runs it always adds the last found vowel a second time.

 

So you would enter 'a' and it would say there were 2 of them.

 

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(){
    
    // Creates string variable to store the users input
    char userString[64];

    // Prompts user for a string
    printf("Please enter a string that is all lowercase and less than 50 charecters\n");

    // Creates variables to store the number of each vowel in the string
    int numA = 0;
    int numE = 0;
    int numI = 0;
    int numO = 0;
    int numU = 0;

    // While loop to count how many of each vowel(s) are in the lowercase string
    while(1) {

        // Ends the program when the user enters CTRL+D
        if (feof(stdin)) break;

        // Stores the user input in userString
        scanf("%s", userString);

        for (int i = 0; userString[i] != '\0'; i++) {
            // Adds the 1 to the total number of each vowel when the vowel comes up in the string
            if (userString[i] == 'a') {
                numA += 1;
            }
            else if (userString[i] == 'e') {
                numE += 1;
            }
            else if (userString[i] == 'i') {
                numI += 1;
            }
            else if (userString[i] == 'o') {
                numO += 1;
            }
            else if (userString[i] == 'u') {
                numU += 1;
            }
        }
    }

    // Prints the output for the number of each vowel in the string
    printf("The vowel a occurred %d times\n", numA);
    printf("The vowel e occurred %d times\n", numE);
    printf("The vowel i occurred %d times\n", numI);
    printf("The vowel o occurred %d times\n", numO);
    printf("The vowel u occurred %d times\n", numU);

    // Returns a 0 to end the program
    return 0;
}

 

[AbydosOne]

47 minutes ago, jrhaberland said:

This program is designed to count how many vowels are in the words the user input, and the program ends when the user does CNTR+D. For some reason the last time the loop runs it always adds the last found vowel a second time.

 

So you would enter 'a' and it would say there were 2 of them.

I'm not super well versed in some of the C stdio functions, but if you flip the positions of the ctrl-D check and parsing for text, it will return the correct values (per my simulations).

 

EDIT: Here's what I assume is happening in the loop...

1. Ctrl-D is checked for
2. String is parsed
3. String is counted

However, by the time you can enter ctrl-D, the program is already blocking on the "string is parsed" line, so it has to loop through again before the ctrl-D check, and I assume that a ctrl-D input to the parse function doesn't fully overwrite what was in the buffer, so (most of?) it gets counted again. If you do it the other way around (as I suggest), you parse input, then check if it happens to be ctrl-D before continuing to count.

[badreg]

11 minutes ago, AbydosOne said:

However, by the time you can enter ctrl-D, the program is already on the "string is parsed" line, so it has to loop through again before the ctrl-D check,

Precisely this. At the beginning of loop #2, the EOF check fails, and scanf() gets called. scanf() encounters EOF, and returns without doing anything to userString. The loop continues, and parses userString again. At the beginning of loop #3, the EOF check passes, and the while loop breaks.

 

Instead of a while(true) loop, this should be the conditional check:

while(scanf("%s", userString) != EOF)

 

[JamesTheFolf]

I was able to fix it by doing this

    // While loop to count how many of each vowel(s) are in the lowercase string
    while(1) {

        // Stores the user input in userString
        scanf("%s", userString);

        // Ends the program when the user enters CTRL+D
        if (feof(stdin)) {
            break;
        }

Essentially just had to switch it so the scanf is before the feof(stdin) statement.