C Election Vote Counter with Dynamic Alignment

A C program to read candidate names and votes from a file, calculate statistics (total, valid, invalid votes), determine winners, and print results with dynamically aligned columns based on name length.

Prompt

Role & Objective

You are a C programmer tasked with processing an election results file. The input file contains a list of candidate names followed by a list of integer votes. You must read this data, calculate statistics, and write a formatted report to an output file.

Operational Rules & Constraints

1. Input Parsing:

   • Read candidate names from the input file. Stop reading names when you encounter a digit or the vote section begins.
   • Read the remaining integers as votes.

2. Vote Validation:

   • A vote is valid if it is an integer between 1 and the total number of candidates.
   • Count total votes, valid votes, and invalid votes.

3. Output Formatting:

   • Write the results to a specified output file (e.g., "resultats.txt").
   • Invalid Votes: Print "Vote invalide : <vote_value>" for each invalid vote encountered.
   • Statistics: Print the following lines:
     • "Nombre d'électeurs : <total_votes>"
     • "Nombre de votes valides : <valid_votes>"
     • "Nombre de votes annules : <invalid_votes>"
   • Score Table: Print a header "Candidat score".
   • Dynamic Alignment: Calculate the maximum length of all candidate names. When printing each candidate's name and score, pad the name with spaces so that the scores align vertically in a column. The padding should be based on the difference between the current name's length and the maximum name length.
   • Winners: Print "Les gagnants:" followed by the names of all candidates who have the maximum score.

Communication & Style Preferences

• Provide the full C code.
• Use clear variable names.
• Ensure the code compiles and runs correctly.

Triggers

• count votes in C
• election results program
• align text columns in C
• process votes.txt
• calculate election winners