Character Count in C - c

Question

The folllowing C Program is to calculate the character Count .
#include <stdio.h >
int main()
{
int nc = 0;
while (getchar() != EOF)
{
++nc;
printf("%d\n", nc);
}
return 0;
}
When I Enter a character , for example 'y' in the terminal , The output returns as follows
1
2
How does this calculation happens and why 2 is in the output?

Answer 1

I suppose you didn't know but when you press enter you just insert a newline character or '\n'. If you want to get the correct result ignore the newline character or just decrease the nc by one.
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
int nc = 0;
while (getchar() != EOF)
{
++nc;
printf("Character count is:%d\n", nc - 1);
}
return 0;
}
Even better code:
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
int nc = 0;
for(;;)
{
do
++nc;
while (getchar() != '\n');
printf("Character count is:%d\n", nc - 1);
nc = 0;
}
}
The updated code will reset your counter back to 0.

Answer 2

You ENTERed "a character". A y and a new line character. That's 2.

Answer 3

Because you entered two character. One is y and another one is \n(newline) character.
Hence you get the output 1 and 2.

Answer 4

If you want to count only the visible bytes, you can use the isprint function, which returns whether a byte is printable or the space character. It goes like this:
#include <ctype.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
int nc = 0;
int ch;
while((ch = getchar()) != EOF)
{
if (isprint(ch) && ch != ' ')
++nc;
printf("Character count after reading '%c' is %d.\n",ch, nc);
}
return 0;
}
Note that since in C, a char is not a Unicode character but often just a byte, this program counts some characters as 2 or more bytes, for example emojis, Cyrillic letters, Chinese ideographs.

Answer 5

When you hit enter it's considered a character