How do I specify that I wish to count the number of vowels in a text document in MatLab?

I'm working on a code that would scan a text file and output the number of vowels in the document i.e 'This file contains x vowels'

This is what I've done so far:

fid=fopen('doc.txt','r');

vowel_set='AaEeIiOoUu';

vowels=0

while ~feof(fid)

     if strfind(vowel_set,c)
             vowels=vowels+1
     end
    break;
end

message=sprintf('This file contains %d vowels.', vowels)'; disp(message);

What am I doing wrong? Thanks a million in advance

[Jan]

Please format your code properly.

[Andreas Goser]

Just as a side note: Depending on the scope of you application, there are characters in non-English languages that can be considered as vowels...

Think of Ӕ,Ӓ,Å

[Jan]

Good point, Andreas. There is no trivial definition of "vowel". Therefore this is an excellent example for a documentation pitfall.

[Jason Ross]

Just wanted to add that this is a great example of "help with homework". Ari tried something, got stuck and posted the code that is not working as expected. Good to see.

[Walter Roberson]

In English, "y" is usually a consonant when it starts a syllable, but usually a vowel in other positions in a syllable. For example, "yellow" starts with a consonant, but "try" ends with a vowel. There are also uncommon cases where an initial "y" is a vowel, such as "Ytterbium"

[Jan]

It is called "a unit", not "an unit" (if I remember correctly). So sometimes even the "u" can be a little bit unvowelish.

Answer 1

[Daniel Shub]

Assuming you have some text saved in a char array called x

length(regexpi(x, 'a|e|i|o|u'))

Answer 2

[Jan]

You do not define a variable called "c". Perhaps you want to add a fgets()? The break stops the loop after the first iteration. strfind replies a vector, which can be empty. Therefore using "if strfind()" does not do, what you need. The any() command would be more helpful - but not sufficient, because you want to know the number.

I suggest fileread or at least reading the complete file at once:

fid = fopen('doc.txt','r');
str = fread(fid, Inf, '*char');

Then ismember will helpful to identify the vowels.

[Ari]

I'm not familiar with the ismember handle. I only started using MatLab a few weeks ago so I'm quite new to it all.

[Jan]

Type "help ismember" and "doc ismember" in the command line. Then consider, that "ismember" does exactly what its name implies. It takes one set of elements (your string imported from the file) and checks if they are member of a second set of elements (the string of vowels you have defined already). Then you get a 1 for each member and a 0 for each non-member. And the sum of the reply is the number of vowels.

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