Displaying most and least common letters

[th3 waffl3r]

Hello,

I have to display the most and least alphabetic character from a file. I decided to break the program into pieces so I could understand each process much better. This program however uses a simple character array that has characters a,b,c. I managed to compute the least and most common letter by using a lettercount array, but that array only holds the number of letter counts, how can I display the actual character?

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
int lettercount[3] = { 0 };
char letterArray[] = { 'a', 'b', 'b', 'b', 'a', 'c', 'c', 'c', 'c', 'c', }; //2as, 3bs, 5cs
char letter;
int templargest = 0;

for (int i = 0; i < sizeof (letterArray); i++)
{
letter = letterArray[i];
lettercount[letter - 'a'] = lettercount[letter - 'a'] + 1; // this line was given by instructor
}
int smallest = lettercount[0];
for (int i = 1; i < sizeof(lettercount) / sizeof(lettercount[0]); i++)
{
if (lettercount[i] < smallest)
{
smallest = lettercount[i];

}
}
cout << "The smallest number is: " << smallest << endl;

for (int i = 0; i < sizeof(lettercount)/ sizeof(lettercount[0]); i++)
{
if (lettercount[i] > templargest)
{
templargest = lettercount[i];
}
}

cout << "the largest number is: " << templargest << endl;
return 0;






}

[48T7M4Gy]

The answer is all in the index value. You know the index of the largest value and you know there is a direct relationship, given by your instructor, between the index value and a letter.

[newbieg]

To the computer, letters are just numbers. cout << (int) 'a' << " " << (int) 'A';
---> You can do arithmetic with numbers.

---> As Kemort says, your instructor's provided code shows how to bring ascii letters down to a zero-started index;
'a'-'a'=>0, 'b'-'a'=>1, 'c'-'a'=>2 etc., just reverse what he did to make;
0+'a'=>'a', 1+'a'=>'b', 2+'a'=>'c', etc.

cout << 2 + 'a'; Would output 'c'.