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

This is too long for a comment.

Python 2 or 3? Because it really matters. Try out the following in your REPL for both:

Python 2.7.12
>>>len("taña")
5

Python 3.5.2
>>>len("taña")
4

Huh? The answer lies in unicode. That ñ is an 'n' with a combining diacritical. Meaning its 1 character, but not 1 byte. So unless you're working with plain ASCII text, you'd better specify which version of python your character counting function is for.

Answer 2

num_lines = sum(1 for line in open('filename.txt'))
num_words = sum(1 for word in open('filename.txt').read().split())
num_chars = sum(len(word) for word in open('filename.txt').read().split())

Answer 3

Remember that each line (except for the last) has a line separator. I.e. "\r\n" for Windows or "\n" for Linux and Mac.

Thus, exactly two characters are added in this case, as 47 and not 45.

A nice way to overcome this could be to use:

import os

fname=input("enter the name of the file:")
infile=open(fname, 'r')
lines=0
words=0
characters=0
for line in infile:
    line = line.strip(os.linesep)
    wordslist=line.split()
    lines=lines+1
    words=words+len(wordslist)
    characters=characters+ len(line)
print(lines)
print(words)
print(characters)

Answer 4

To count the characters, you should count each individual word. So you could have another loop that counts characters:

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

That ought to do it. The wordslist should probably take away newline characters on the right, something like wordslist = line.rstrip().split() perhaps.