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

A more Pythonic solution than the others:

with open('foo.txt') as f:
  text = f.read().splitlines() # list of lines

lines = len(text) # length of the list = number of lines
words = sum(len(line.split()) for line in text) # split each line on spaces, sum up the lengths of the lists of words
characters = sum(len(line) for line in text) # sum up the length of each line

print(lines)
print(words)
print(characters)

The other answers here are manually doing what str.splitlines() does. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel.

Answer 2

I found this solution very simply and readable:

with open("filename", 'r') as file:
    text = file.read().strip().split()
    len_chars = sum(len(word) for word in text)
    print(len_chars)

Answer 3

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:

Answer 4

Sum up the length of all words in a line:

characters += sum(len(word) for word in wordslist)

The whole program:

with open('my_words.txt') as infile:
    lines=0
    words=0
    characters=0
    for line in infile:
        wordslist=line.split()
        lines=lines+1
        words=words+len(wordslist)
        characters += sum(len(word) for word in wordslist)
print(lines)
print(words)
print(characters)

Output:

3
13
35

This:

(len(word) for word in wordslist)

is a generator expression. It is essentially a loop in one line that produces the length of each word. We feed these lengths directly to sum:

sum(len(word) for word in wordslist)

Improved version

This version takes advantage of enumerate, so you save two lines of code, while keeping the readability:

with open('my_words.txt') as infile:
    words = 0
    characters = 0
    for lineno, line in enumerate(infile, 1):
        wordslist = line.split()
        words += len(wordslist)
        characters += sum(len(word) for word in wordslist)

print(lineno)
print(words)
print(characters)

This line:

with open('my_words.txt') as infile:

opens the file with the promise to close it as soon as you leave indentation. It is always good practice to close file after your are done using it.

Answer 5

Here is the code:

fp = open(fname, 'r+').read()
chars = fp.decode('utf8')
print len(chars)

Check the output. I just tested it.

Answer 6

It is probably counting new line characters. Subtract characters with (lines+1)