11 – Count characters in a file

11 – Count characters in a file#

You can use chain from the module itertools to iterate over the characters of a file, with chain.from_iterable(f).

Pair it with Counter, from the module collections, and you have a way to count all characters in a file with Counter(chain.from_iterable(f)):

from collections import Counter
from itertools import chain

with open("/Users/rodrigogs/.zshrc") as f:
    chars = Counter(chain.from_iterable(f))

print(chars.most_common(5))
# [(' ', 583), ('e', 314), ('t', 273), ('o', 264), ('n', 216)]

Now… It’s unlikely that you’ll have to count the characters in a file very often. But this fun example helps you understand what chain can do, and chain is quite useful!

(Note: by default, line endings of the form \r\n will get turned into \n, so \r won’t be counted. This may or may not be desirable.)