Introduction

Scrabble is a popular word game that involves forming words on a board using lettered tiles. Each tile has a point value, and the goal is to create words that accumulate the highest score. In this guide, we’ll learn how to calculate the score of a Scrabble word using the C programming language.

Objective

The objective of this program is to calculate the score of a given Scrabble word based on the individual letter values. Each letter in the Scrabble game has a different point value. The program will take a word as input, and it will return the total score based on the points assigned to each letter in that word.

Program Code

#include 
#include 

// Function to calculate the Scrabble score of a word
int calculateScrabbleScore(char word[]) {
    int score = 0;
    int i = 0;
    char letter;

    // Define the point values for each letter
    int letterPoints[] = {1, 3, 3, 2, 1, 4, 2, 4, 1, 8, 5, 1, 3, 3, 2, 4, 1, 4, 1, 8, 4, 10, 1, 1, 3, 10}; 

    // Iterate through each letter in the word
    while ((letter = word[i++]) != '\0') {
        // Convert to uppercase to handle case-insensitivity
        letter = toupper(letter);

        // Check if the letter is a valid letter
        if (letter >= 'A' && letter <= 'Z') {
            // Calculate the score for the letter
            score += letterPoints[letter - 'A'];
        }
    }
    return score;
}

int main() {
    char word[100];
    
    // Input the word from the user
    printf("Enter a Scrabble word: ");
    fgets(word, sizeof(word), stdin);
    
    // Calculate the score of the word
    int score = calculateScrabbleScore(word);
    
    // Output the result
    printf("The Scrabble score for the word \"%s\" is: %d\n", word, score);
    
    return 0;
}

Program Explanation

This program consists of several parts:

• Header Files: The program includes the stdio.h header for input/output functions and ctype.h for converting characters to uppercase.
• Letter Points Array: An array is defined to store the point values for each letter in the English alphabet. The values are based on Scrabble’s scoring rules.
• calculateScrabbleScore Function: This function takes the input word, iterates over each character, converts it to uppercase, and adds its corresponding point value to the total score. It returns the total score of the word.
• Main Function: The main() function prompts the user to input a word, calls the calculateScrabbleScore() function to calculate the score, and displays the result.

How to Run the Program

Follow these steps to run the program:

1. Open a text editor and copy the program code into a new file.
2. Save the file with a .c extension (e.g., scrabble_score.c).
3. Open a terminal or command prompt.
4. Navigate to the directory where the file is saved.
5. Compile the program using the following command:

   gcc scrabble_score.c -o scrabble_score

6. Run the program by typing:

   ./scrabble_score

7. Enter a word when prompted, and the program will display the Scrabble score.