domletters — count dominant letters

Max Van Raden and Bart Massey 2021

This repository contains a program that counts dominant letters in alphabetic words of an ASCII text read from standard input, printing the total count on standard output.

An "alphabetic word" is any sequence of one or more ASCII letters (a-z and/or A-Z) surrounded by whitespace. For example

This isn't an "incomplete sentence". Really
not.

contains just three words: This, an and Really.

The "dominant letter count" of a word is the maximum number of times that a given letter appears in the word, treating upper and lowercase letters as equivalent. Examples:

• The dominant letter count of any is 1, since the most any letter appears is once.

• The dominant letter count of bookkeeper is 3, since e appears three times.

• The dominant letter count of Arable is 2, since a appears twice (once uppercase, once lowercase).

Build and Run

To build the program, type make. This will use the file named Makefile to compile the program.

To run the program once it is built, say

./domletters <input.txt

where input.txt is the input file to be processed.

Example

When run using the file sentence.txt in this distribution, the program will produce a dominant letter count of 20. When run on swift.txt it will produce 71.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Project Gutenberg for the text of Tom Swift and His Airship, from which the file swift.txt in this distribution was taken.

License

This work is made available under the "MIT License". Please see the file LICENSE in this distribution for license terms.