Dictionary Shortener

Recently, I had to write a program that shortened the dictionary. What I mean by this is that using a full dictionary (over 237,000 words), I needed to weed out the words that were longer than eight letters and shorter than three letters. I needed a list of letters between three and eight letters for an upcoming game that happens to need a dictionary to check against.

Why do I bring this up? Well, my program takes advantage of fstream, a coder's good friend or enemy, depending on your understanding of it.

In my next posting, I will show you the finer points of using fstream, but for now, here is the code for the dictionary shortening program:

#include <iostream>

#include <fstream>

#include <string>

using namespace std;

int main()

{

    string word;

    ifstream infile;

    ofstream outfile;

    int count=0;

    infile.open("fulldictionary.txt");

    if(infile.fail())

    {

        cout<<"File could not be opened\n";

        system("PAUSE");

        return 0;

    }

    outfile.open("dictionary_short.txt");

    if(outfile.fail())

    {

        cout<<"File could not be opened\n";

        system("PAUSE");

        return 0;

    }

    for(int i=0;!infile.fail();i++)

    {

        getline(infile,word);

        if(word.length()>=3&&word.length()<=8)

        {

            count+=1;

            cout<<count<<": "<<word<<endl;

            outfile<<word<<endl;

        }

    }

    infile.close();

    outfile.close();

    cout<<"There were "<<count<<" words saved in dictionary_short.txt\n";

    system("PAUSE");

    return 0;

}

The above code assumes that you have a file called "fulldictionary.txt" in the project folder and will automatically create the output file. There's no need to make that one.