Find the number of characters in a file using Python

Question

Here is the question:

I have a file with these words:

hey how are you
I am fine and you
Yes I am fine

And it is asked to find the numbe

Answer 1

How's this? It uses a regular expression to match all non-whitespace characters and returns the number of matches within a string.

import re

DATA="""
hey how are you
I am fine and you
Yes I am fine
"""

def get_char_count(s):
    return len(re.findall(r'\S', s))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print(get_char_count(DATA))

Output

35

The image below shows this tested on RegExr: