Write a function to take a text file and print the number of lines, words, and characters in the file

Question

I am currently struggling with a question related to Python File I/O. The question I that I fail to be able to complete is this:

Write a function stats() that takes one input argument: the
name of a text file. The function should print, on the screen, the
number of lines, words, and characters in the file; your function
should open the file only once. 

I must also eliminate all puncuation to properly get all of the words.The function should print like so:

>>>stats('example.txt')
line count: 3
word count: 20
character count: 98

Answer 1

Please review the Python documentation about I/O here, Built-in Functions here, and Common string operations here.

There are many ways to get this done. With a quick go at it, the following should get the job done based on your requirements. The split function will eliminate spaces when it converts each line to a list.

def GetFileCounts(in_file):
    char_count = 0
    word_count = 0
    line_count = 0
    with open(in_file) as read_file:
        for line in read_file:
            line_count += 1
            char_count += len(line)
            word_count += len(line.split(' '))
    print "line count: {0}\nword count: {1}\ncharacter count: {2}".format(line_count, word_count, char_count)

You may want to refine your requirements defintion a bit more as there are some subtle things that can change the output:

• What is your definition of a character?
  • only letters?
  • letters, spaces, in word punctuation (e.g. hyphens), end of lines, etc.?

Answer 2

As far as your question goes,you can achieve it by:

fname = "inputfile.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)

There are lots of free tutorial online for python. Please refer those throughly. You can find reference books here

Answer 3

Are you open to third party libs?

Have a look at: https://textblob.readthedocs.org/en/dev/

It has all of the features you want implemented pretty well.

Answer 4

@nagato , i think yout with num_chars += len(line) you come all from the file , character's and blank space , but thank for your code , i can my to do...

My...

def char_freq_table():
   with open('/home/.....', 'r') as f:
   line = 0
   word = 0
   character = 0
   for i in f:
     line = len(list('f'))
     word += len(i.split()) 
     character =  i.replace(" ", "")  #lose the blank space
   print "line count: ", line
   print "word count: ", word
   print "character count: ", len(character) # length all character

char_freq_table()

Answer 5

filename = 'Inputfile.txt'

def filecounts(filename):
    
    try:
        f= open(filename)

    except IOError:
        print("Unable to open the file for reading  %s: %s" % (filename))

    text = f.readlines()
    f.close() 


    linecount = 0
    wordcount = 0
    lettercount = 0

    for i in text:

        linecount += 1

        lettercount += len(i)

        wordcount += len(i.split(' '))

    return lettercount, wordcount, linecount

print ("Problem 1: letters: %d, words: %d, lines: %d" %  (filecounts(filename)))