RNG in loop and printing word from string array

Question

Ok, I have this working perfectly now, and I've edited this post and code below to reflect the updated correctly working code.

Read 50 words from a text file into an array of strings
The program will use random numbers for:

a.- It will generate a random number between 2 and 7 for the selection of the words to be used in the sentence

b.- It will generate a random number for the selection of the words. The number will be between 0 and 49, because those are the positions of the words in the array
It will display the sentence on the screen.

Thank you ahead of time for any suggestions

#include <string>
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <time.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <array>

using namespace std;

int main() {
ofstream outFile;
ifstream inFile;
const int size = 50; //initiate constant size for array
string word[size]; //initialize array of string
srand(time(0)); //sets timing factor for random variables

int Random2 = rand() % 6 + 2; //determines random value beteen 2 and 7
inFile.open("words.txt");   //opens input text file
if (!inFile.is_open()) { //tests to see if file opened corrected
    exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
while (!inFile.eof()) { //Puts file info into string
    for (int i = 0; i < size; ++i)
    inFile >> word[i];
}
for (int i = 0; i < Random2; i++) { //loops through array and generates    second random variable each loop to determine word to print
    int Random1 = rand() % size;
    cout << word[Random1] << " ";
}
cin.get();
}

James Adkison · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-29 03:10:20Z

1

int generateRandom()
{
    default_random_engine generator;
    uniform_int_distribution<int> distribution(0, 49);
    int random = distribution(generator);  // generates number in the range 0..49
    return random;
}

The problem is that each time you call the getRandom() function you create a new PRNG instance. Therefore, each instance is called only once and the first result is always the same.

Instead you want to create the instance once and call the same instance multiple times.

default_random_engine generator;
uniform_int_distribution<int> distribution(0, 49);

for (int i = 0; i < 5; ++i)
{
    std::cout << distribution(generator) << std::endl;
}

cout << words[generateRandom()]

words is declared to be type std::string. Using [] accesses a single character within the string. What are you expecting here? Did you intend to have an array of strings (i.e., one for each line in the text file)? If so, you want something like std::vector<std::string> words. Now using words[0] accesses an element in the array and each element is of type std::string (as opposed to a single character like before).

edited Sep 29, 2015 at 3:10

answered Sep 29, 2015 at 3:03

James Adkison

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1 Comment

Jetster220 Over a year ago

Thank you, looks like I misunderstood how the RNG instance worked when called, that makes much more sense now. Yes, for the string, I'm trying to use the number created from the RNG to randomly pick one of 50 words from the .txt file to then be printed. I think the answer the person below gave is what I was actually thinking of, with using the token to find the beginning of each word and print to the delimiter.

Michael Albers · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-29 03:04:07Z

0

As for printing single characters, you're only printing the character because that's how the [] operator works for strings. You'll need to tokenize the string. See strtok.

answered Sep 29, 2015 at 3:04

Michael Albers

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1 Comment

Jetster220 Over a year ago

Thanks, I believe strtok is actually what I was trying to think of when I used [ ] instead.

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