hi, I'm a bit of a noob, but I am trying to finish writing a program that computes the longest and shortest word of a string in c++ among other things. so far, I have this function for the longest word-
int findLongest (string y)
{
int j=y.length();
int i=0;
int number=0,newnumber=0;

for (i=0; i<=j;++i)
{
if (y.at(i)==32)
{number=0;}
else
{number++;}
if (newnumber<number)
{newnumber=number;}//<<i suspect
}

however, whenever I try to run it, I get an out of bounds error, and I can't figure out how to stop it from "running off the end of the loop".
any thoughts of how to fix this and how to convert it to get the shortest word would be greatly appreciated, been working on making the program for three days when it shoulda been done in two 0.o

Your logic itself seems to be wrong.
There are a lot of loopholes.
First of all you are not saving the longest and the shortest words.

In the above if statement you have to save the words. You should also have variables for saving the longest word count and the shortest word count.

You must be learning c++ right?
Get a good book. There are a lot of books available for free on the net.
Hope I'm not offending you.

because arrays start counting at 0 (int i=0) they must stop at the length minus one or (j-1). This is done by using the i<j rather than i<=j

Hope that helps you a little.