Word counter returning incorrect number of words [SOLVED]

I’ve been trying to create a program that reads text from a file and stores it in a string. I feed the string to a function that counts every word in the string.

However its only accurate assuming the user leaves some whitespace at the end of a line and doesn’t creates blank lines…. not a very good word counter.

• Creating a blank line results in a false increment to the word count.

I’m not sure if my main problem is using a boolean to do this or checking for whitespace and ‘\n’ characters.

bool countingLetters = false;
int wordCount = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < text.length(); i++)
{
    if (text[i] == ' ' && countingLetters == true)
    {
        countingLetters = false;
        wordCount++;
    }
    if (text[i] != ' ' && countingLetters == false)
    {
        countingLetters = true;
    }
    if (text[i] == '\n' && countingLetters == true)
    {
        countingLetters = false;
        wordCount++;
    }
}

>Solution :

An alternative is to count the beginning of a "word".

Let us say the beginning of a word is a letter after a non-letter. We can adjust this if desired.

int wordCount = 0;
int prior = '\n';  // some non-letter
for (int i = 0; i < text.length(); i++) {
  if (isalpha(text[i]) && !isalpha(prior)) {
    wordCount++;
  }
  prior = text[i];
}