Final answer:
The student's question involves writing a C program to count the number of sentences in a file. The program should read through the file and increment a counter when it encounters sentence terminators. The total count is then outputted.
Step-by-step explanation:
The student is asked to write a C program that will read the contents of a file and count the number of sentences within it. In programming, a common approach to determining the end of a sentence is to look for sentence terminators such as periods (.), exclamation points (!), and question marks (?). Here is a simple program in C that accomplishes this task:
#include
int main() {
FILE *file;
char filename[100], character;
int sentences = 0;
printf("Enter the filename to open for reading \\");
scanf("%s", filename);
file = fopen(filename, "r");
if (file == NULL) {
printf("Could not open file %s", filename);
return 1;
}
while ((character = fgetc(file)) != EOF) {
if (character == '.' || character == '?' || character == '!') {
sentences++;
}
}
printf("The file %s contains %d sentences.", filename, sentences);
fclose(file);
return 0;
}
This program prompts the user for a file name, and then reads through the file character by character. It increments a counter every time a sentence terminator is encountered. After reading the entire file, it outputs the total number of sentences found.