Tutorial: count vowels and consonants in a word

CountVowelsAndConsonants(X) receives one word card. For “reluctant”, start i = 1, Vcount = 0 and Ccount = 0. Inspect the ith letter. If it is a vowel, increase Vcount; ELSE increase Ccount. Then increase i outside both branches.

Procedure CountVowelsAndConsonants(X):
    Letters = alphabetic letters of X.Word
    i = 1
    Vcount = 0
    Ccount = 0
    while i <= number of Letters:
        if lowercase(Letters[i]) is one of a, e, i, o, u:
            Vcount = Vcount + 1
        else:
            Ccount = Ccount + 1
        i = i + 1
    return (Vcount, Ccount)
End Procedure

The tutorial’s word has no punctuation and uses the stored LetterCount as the loop limit. To let you try cards like “cane...” and “fire-eyed”, this explorer makes a letters-only sequence first and ignores punctuation and hyphens. It uses the five-vowel convention a/e/i/o/u, so y is counted as a consonant here. This extension is stated explicitly; punctuation is not treated as a consonant.

The loop condition uses ≤, so the ninth letter is processed. After the final update, i becomes 10 and the test fails. At every step, Vcount + Ccount equals the number of letters already processed. The procedure returns two values in order: (vowels, consonants). The caller can store them as (V, C) = CountVowelsAndConsonants(X).