how to count the characters in a text file - c++

Question

im trying to count the characters inside a text file in c++, this is what i have so far, for some reason im getting 4. even thou i have 123456 characters in it. if i increase or decrease the characters i still get 4, please help and thanks in advance
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
const char FileName[] = "text.txt";
int main ()
{
string line;
ifstream inMyStream (FileName);
int c;
if (inMyStream.is_open())
{
while( getline (inMyStream, line)){
cout<<line<<endl;
c++;
}
}
inMyStream.close();
system("pause");
return 0;
}

Answer 1

You're counting the lines.
You should count the characters. change it to:
while( getline ( inMyStream, line ) )
{
cout << line << endl;
c += line.length();
}

Answer 2

There are probably hundreds of ways to do that.
I believe the most efficient is:
inMyStream.seekg(0,std::ios_base::end);
std::ios_base::streampos end_pos = inMyStream.tellg();
return end_pos;

Answer 3

First of all, you have to init a local var, this means:
int c = 0;
instead of
int c;
I think the old and easy to understand way is to use the get() function till the end char EOF
char current_char;
if (inMyStream.is_open())
{
while(inMyStream.get(current_char)){
if(current_char == EOF)
{
break;
}
c++;
}
}
Then c will be the count of the characters

Answer 4

this is how i would approach the problem:
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
int main ()
{
string line;
int sum=0;
ifstream inData ;
inData.open("countletters.txt");
while(!inData.eof())
{
getline(inData,line);
int numofChars= line.length();
for (unsigned int n = 0; n<line.length();n++)
{
if (line.at(n) == ' ')
{
numofChars--;
}
}
sum=numofChars+sum;
}
cout << "Number of characters: "<< sum << endl;
return 0 ;
}

Answer 5

Just use good old C FILE pointers:
int fileLen(std::string fileName)
{
FILE *f = fopen(fileName.c_str(), "rb");
if (f == NULL || ferror(f))
{
if (f)
fclose(f);
return -1;
}
fseek(f, 0, SEEK_END);
int len = fell(f);
fclose(f);
return len;
}

Answer 6

I found out this simple method , hope this helps
while(1)
{
if(txtFile.peek() == -1)
break;
c = txtFile.get();
if(c != txtFile.eof())
noOfChars++;
}

Answer 7

This works for sure, it is designed to read character by character.
It could be easily put into a class and you may apply function for every char, so you may check for '\n', ' ' and so on. Just have some members in your class, where they can be saved, so you may only return 0 and use methods to get what exactly you want.
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
unsigned long int count(std::string string)
{
char c;
unsigned long int cc = 0;
std::ifstream FILE;
FILE.open(string);
if (!FILE.fail())
{
while (1)
{
FILE.get(c);
if (FILE.eof()) break;
cc++; //or apply a function to work with this char..eg: analyze(c);
}
FILE.close();
}
else
{
std::cout << "Counter: Failed to open file: " << string << std::endl;
}
return cc;
};
int main()
{
std::cout << count("C:/test/ovecky.txt") << std::endl;
for (;;);
return 0;
}

Answer 8

C++ provides you with a simple set of functions you can use to retrieve the size of stream segment.
In your case, we want to find the file end, which can be done by using fstream::seekg, and providing the fstream::end.
note that fstream is not implementing the end iterator overload, this is it's own end constant
When we've seeked towards the end of the file, we want to get the position of the stream pointer, using tellg (also known as the character count in our case).
But we're not done yet. We need to also set the stream pointer to its original position, otherwise we'll be reading from the end of the file. Something we don't want to do.
So lets call fstream::seekg again, but this time set the position to the begining of the file using fstream::beg
std::ifstream stream(filepath);
//Seek to end of opened file
stream.seekg(0, stream.end);
int size = stream.tellg();
//reset file pointer to the beginning of the file
stream.seekg(0, stream.beg);