Word count not working when entering new line

Question

I've been looking at other stack overflow articles regarding similar issues when it comes to word count in C#, but none have helped me when it comes to the pickle I've encountered.

I have a textbox that inputs text from a text file. The text is split into three lines by me pressing the enter button to create a new line in a text file. The text reads:

It's a test to see "if" the
application_for Top Image Systems
actually work. Hopefully it does work.

Now as you can see there should be 17 words, however my word count only says 15. I have realized after a bit of trial and error that the issue must be the fact it's in a new line. Every time it goes to a new line, it thinks the last word of the previous line and the first word of the new line are together as a word (or that's what I think the program is thinking).

My question is with the code I have below, how can I get to recognize that if there is a new line, that it should split the words like a space?

Below is my code:

string nl = System.Environment.NewLine;

//Missing Code to read text file which I don't need to include in this example

do
{
    textLine = textLine + txtReader.ReadLine();
}

//Read line until there is no more characters
while (txtReader.Peek() != -1);

//seperate certain characters in order to find words
char[] seperator = (" " + nl).ToCharArray();

//number of words
int numberOfWords = textLine.Split(seperator, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries).Length;

Answer 1

txtReader.ReadLine(); strips your newline away. From the msdn:

The string that is returned does not contain the terminating carriage return or line feed.

so you have to add it manually (or just add a space)

textLine = textLine + txtReader.ReadLine() + " ";

consider using the StringBuilder class for repeated concatination of strings.

Edit:

To get the character count as if the spaces were never added, do:

int charCount = textLine.Length - lineCount;

where lineCount an integer that you increment every time you add a space in your do-while loop:

int lineCount = 0;

do
{
    textLine = textLine + txtReader.ReadLine();
    lineCount++;
}

Answer 2

I'm a bit of a beginner myself, sorry if this is not a great answer, but I've just done a bunch of text stuff in c# and I'd probably approach by replacing the line breaks which will show up as "\n" or "\r" in your original string with a space, " " - something like:

nl = nl.Replace("\r", " ");