Count Number of Characters in Text File - Python Examples
Python - Count Number of Characters
You can count number of words in a text file, by first reading the text to a variable, and then counting the characters. We shall go through the sequence of steps required to count the characters.
Steps to Count Number of Characters
To count the number of characters in a text file, follow these steps.
- Open the file in read mode
- Read the text using read() function.
- Get the length of the string, that should be the number of characters in the text file.
- You can refine the count by cleaning the string like removing white space characters and punctuation marks.
Examples
1. Count characters in a given Text File
In this Python Example, we will read a text file and count the number of characters in it. Consider the following text file.
Text File
Welcome to www.pythonexamples.org. Here, you will find python programs for all general use cases.Python Program
#open file in read mode
file = open("C:\data.txt", "r")
#read the content of file
data = file.read()
#get the length of the data
number_of_characters = len(data)
print('Number of characters in text file :', number_of_characters)Output
Number of characters in text file : 972. Count characters in a given Text File excluding spaces
In this Python Example, we will read a text file and count the number of characters in it excluding white space characters. Consider the following text file.
Text File
Welcome to www.pythonexamples.org. Here, you will find python programs for all general use cases.Python Program
#open file in read mode
file = open("C:\data.txt", "r")
#read the content of file and replace spaces with nothing
data = file.read().replace(" ","")
#get the length of the data
number_of_characters = len(data)
print('Number of characters in text file :', number_of_characters)Output
Number of characters in text file : 84Summary
In this tutorial of Python Examples, we learned how to count number of characters in text file, with the help of example programs.