Counting lines, words, and characters within a text file using Python

Functions that might be helpful:

  • open("file").read() which reads the contents of the whole file at once
  • 'string'.splitlines() which separates lines from each other (and discards empty lines)

By using len() and those functions you could accomplish what you're doing.


fname = "feed.txt"
feed = open(fname, 'r')

num_lines = len(feed.splitlines())
num_words = 0
num_chars = 0

for line in lines:
    num_words += len(line.split())

Try this:

fname = "feed.txt"

num_lines = 0
num_words = 0
num_chars = 0

with open(fname, 'r') as f:
    for line in f:
        words = line.split()

        num_lines += 1
        num_words += len(words)
        num_chars += len(line)

Back to your code:

fname = "feed.txt"
fname = open('feed.txt', 'r')

what's the point of this? fname is a string first and then a file object. You don't really use the string defined in the first line and you should use one variable for one thing only: either a string or a file object.

for line in feed:
    lines = line.split('\n')

line is one line from the file. It does not make sense to split('\n') it.

Tags:

Python