Word counting progam - how to deal with multiple spaces between words?

[samuel89m]

I am new to programming, and one of our first assignments is to produce a program that counts the number of words and number of lines from a file. I have the word counter set up to count spaces or new lines to determine how many words there are. This becomes a problem if there is more than one space between words. Any ideas how to fix this problem? Thanks!

[LB]

If you use formatted input, you do not have to worry about this at all. The formatted input operators already read single words at a time.

if(std::ifstream in ("in.txt"))
{
    int words = 0;
    std::string word;
    while(in >> word)
    {
        ++words;
    }
    std::cout << "The file contained " << words << " words" << std::endl;
}

Hint: if you still need to count lines, you can always put the line into a std::istringstream and then use the above code.