Longest Word

This is a challenge exercise. It is not compulsory, and may be completed individually or with your lab partner.

In this activity, you will make a program called longestWord.c.

This program should read in characters using getchar() until the end of input is reached.

Your program should determine the longest word, from the input it scanned in.

For simplicity, characters that are part of a word are

lowercase and uppercase letters,
numbers,
the apostrophe,
the hyphen (-), and
underscore (_). Every other character is considered a separator between words. You are also allowed to assume that the longest word will be less than 255 characters long.

Remember, you may not always start or end with a word and multiple word separators doesn’t indicate multiple words.

For example:

$ ./longestWord
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
Ctrl+D
The longest word was: jumped

If there is a tie for the longest word, your program should print the first of the longest words, e.g.

$ ./longestWord
Man, I can't, I shan't,
formulate an anthem where the words comprise mnenonics
dreaded mnenonics for pi.
Ctrl+D
The longest word was: formulate

Remember, getchar() will read in the next character from input and return it. When it reaches the end of input, it will return the value EOF. You can tell a program to stop reading characters by using Ctrl+D which will cause getchar() to return the EOF value.

To read from a file instead of typing in text, you can use <. For example:

$ ./longestWord < myTestFile.txt

To tell the program you have finished typing, you can press Ctrl+D.

To run some simple automated tests:

$ 1511 autotest longestWord

To run Styl-o-matic:

$ 1511 stylomatic longestWord.c
Looks good!

You’ll get advice if you need to make changes to your code.

Submit your work with the give command, like so:

$ give cs1511 wk06_longestWord

Or, if you are working from home, upload the relevant file(s) to the wk06_longestWord activity on Give Online.