Two dots in the end of text file in C++

Question

Here's the deal, i have a text file that contain some sentence from a book and i want to read and count the number of sentence in it. One way i found was to count the number of dots in the file. It works fine until the last char. When the reading arrives at the last char (which is a dot) it adds another dots and i double-checked the text file and there is only one dot at the end. When i print each char during the reading process i see the second dot at the end. Here is my code:

#include <string>
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>

using namespace std;

int main(void)
{
    ifstream files("assommoir.txt");
    char caractere;
    int n = 0;

    if (files.fail() == 0)
    {

        while (files.eof() == 0)
        {
            files >> caractere;
            cout << caractere;
            if (int(caractere) == 46)
                n++;
        }
        cout << n << "\n";
    }
    else
        cout << "reading problem detected" << endl;
}    

Answer 1

files.eof() is true once you've tried to read a character past the last one, not once you've read the last one. Because of this, files.eof() succeeds after the last character, but the flag is raised after you do files >> caractere. Since you don't check at this point, caractere is unmodified (it remains a point) and your program goes on until it loops again.

You should use while (files >> caractere), since input streams are convertible to a boolean value that indicates if it's in a valid state or not.