Text file i/o problem....I always get 0 with charnum ...whats the problem with the code??

function charnum=char_counter(fname,character)
fid=fopen(fname,'rt')
if fid<0
charnum=-1;
return;
end
if fid ~=0 && ischar(character)==true
charnum=count(fname,"character ");
else
charnum=-1;
end

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

Your code has likely has several bugs, e.g. you were checking for literal "character" as opposed to using the contents of the character variable:

charnum = count(fname,character);

One more bug is that you are checking the input fname for these characters... but I suspect that you need to import the file contents and check that, but nowhere in your code do you actually import the file contents.

[Marco Nashaat]

Thanks it's working now...but not quite perfectly... I passed 3 out of 4 tests and got this message...Variable charnum has an incorrect value. When testing with ' ' your solution returned 1 which is incorrect. (75444)......can you please help!!

[Stephen23]

For a valid file fid will be >=3, not >0, so you might need something like this:

fid = fopen(fname,'rt')
if fid>=3
    ... import file contents, etc.
    charnum = ...
else
    charnum = -1;
end

[Walter Roberson]

Testing 0 is fine.

You are counting characters in the file name instead of reading from the file and counting the characters in what results.

By the way, see fileread()