How does increment work in this scenario C++

Question

I did not write this code. i'm on my 3rd day of coding in C++ and i'm having a hard time understanding how incremnent works in general.

int main()
{
  int antal_ord {};
  double medellangd {};
  string kort_ord;
  string langt_ord;
  int min_length {100}; 
  int max_length {};
  string S;

 cout << "Mata in en text:\n" << endl;

  while (cin >> S)
    {
      if (S.length() > max_length)
    {
      max_length = S.length();
      langt_ord = S;
    }
      
      if (S.length() < min_length)
    {
      min_length = S.length();
      kort_ord = S;
    }
      

      medellangd+=S.length();
      antal_ord++;
      
    }
  

  if (antal_ord == 0)
    {
      cout << "Inga ord matades in." << endl;
    }
  else {
    medellangd = (medellangd / antal_ord);
    round(medellangd);
    
    cout << "Texten innehöll " << antal_ord << " ord." << endl;
    cout << "Det kortaste ordet var " << '"' << kort_ord << '"' << " med "
     << kort_ord.length() << " tecken." << endl;
    cout << "Det längsta ordet var " << '"' << langt_ord << '"' << " med "
     << langt_ord.length() << " tecken." << endl;
    cout << "Medelordlängden var "<< fixed << setprecision(1) << medellangd << " tecken.";
  }
  return 0; 
}

antal_ord is the variable for the amount of words written in this scenario. In the line where it says "cout << "Texten innehöll " << antal_ord << " ord." << endl;" how does it know how many words have been written? The only time this variable is used before this line is when the variable gets incremented, but how does that let the variable know how many words have been written in total? and also the .length command, does it basically just count the amount of letters written?

Answer 1

There's really nothing special going on here. Every time you read one word with cin >> S, you increment antal_ord by one. Since you started with zero words written and antal_ord==0, at the end antal_ord will equal the number of words read from cin.

Similarly, S.length() returns the number of letters currently in S. In your case, that is exactly the number of letters read from cin since you didn't chance S after reading. But if you did S += " some extra letters, then S.length() will of course change.