Welcome folks today in this post we will be doing text analysis about as text file such as counting no of words,lines and special characters in python. All the full source code of the application is shown below.

Get Started

In order to get started you need to make an app.py file and copy paste the following code

app.py

# -*- cofing: utf-8 -*-
import os
import sys
import collections
import string

script_name = sys.argv[0]

res = {
    "total_lines":"",
    "total_characters":"",
    "total_words":"",
    "unique_words":"",
    "special_characters":""
}

try:
    textfile = sys.argv[1]
    with open(textfile, "r", encoding = "utf_8") as f:

        data = f.read()
        res["total_lines"] = data.count(os.linesep)
        res["total_characters"] = len(data.replace(" ","")) - res["total_lines"]
        counter = collections.Counter(data.split())
        d = counter.most_common()
        res["total_words"] = sum([i[1] for i in d])
        res["unique_words"] = len([i[0] for i in d])
        special_chars = string.punctuation
        res["special_characters"] = sum(v for k, v in collections.Counter(data).items() if k in special_chars)

except IndexError:
    print('Usage: %s TEXTFILE' % script_name)
except IOError:
    print('"%s" cannot be opened.' % textfile)

print(res)

And now if you execute the python script you need to provide also an additional command line argument which will be the path of the text file to analyze in this script.

python app.py input.txt

This is the input.txt file that i am analyzing is shown below

input.txt

this is a text file

So now as you can see it has returned all the information about the text file i.e. how many characters and lines and also unique words and also special_characters. All this information is contained inside a json object