java - Buffered Reader character count

user_17526384 0
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I am fairly new to Java and coding in general. In the below program, this is set to read the number of lines in a file and the number of characters.

While it gives the correct number of lines, I get more characters than present in my .txt file, so i assume it is also reading the new line characters. As an example, in a test file with the text: "hello world" it will read the character count as 12 instead of 10.

Any advice on how I would get my program to read only the characters and not the new line character also?

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;

import javax.swing.JOptionPane;

public class ReadFile 
{
     public static void main(String[] args) 
     {
         try {  /*define block of code to test for errors while it is being executed*/
             String inName = JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Please enter the input file name here");
             int linecount = 0, charcount = 0;
            
             
             /*open the input file*/
             BufferedReader inBuf = new BufferedReader (new FileReader (inName)); /*Initializes buffered reader*/
             
             while ((inBuf.readLine()) !=null) { /*reads the contents of the file, line by line*/
                 linecount++; /*counts the number of lines read*/
             }
             
             inBuf.close(); /*closes input file*/
             
             
             BufferedReader inBuf2 = new BufferedReader (new FileReader (inName));
             while ((inBuf2.read()) != -1) {
                 charcount++; /*counts the number of characters read*/
             }
             
             /*closes input file*/
             inBuf2.close();
             
             /*Displays the number of lines and characters read*/
             JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Number of lines in this file is: " + linecount);
             JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Number of characters in this file is: " + charcount);
             
         }
         /*catch that allows code to be executed if error occurs*/
         catch (FileNotFoundException f) {
             JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "File cannot be found! Details:\n" + f);
         }
         catch (IOException a) {
             JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "An error has occured when reading this file! Details:\n" + a);
         }
         
         System.exit(0); /*exits system*/
     }
}
bufferedreader java
1 Answers

I ran your code locally.

  1. "hello world" has 11 characters. You have to include the white space between hello and world.
  2. I'm assuming you have a white space after "world" on that same line and that's why you are seeing 12 instead of 11.
  3. You may want to refactor how you are doing your code just a bit. Specifically not opening the same file twice because its inefficient and you should close your BufferedReader inside the finally block of a try/catch/finally or use try with resources. This is to avoid potential memory leaks that are caused by not properly closing a stream because an exception may have been thrown.

If you are looking to only count alpha or alphanumeric characters then checkout java.lang.Character#isLetterOrDigit(char ch)

tldr; Here's the simple fix. Just add this if statement when reading the characters

while (( c= inBuf2.read()) != -1) {
   if(Character.isLetter(c))
   charcount++; /*counts the number of characters read*/
}
user_62203310
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