Count Words in Text File in Python

Our task is to create a Python program that reads a text file, counts the number of words in the file and prints the word count. This can be done by opening the file, reading its contents, splitting the text into words, and then counting the total number of words.

Example 1: Count String Words

First, we create a text file of which we want to count the number of words. Let this file be a sample text file named geeks.text with the following contents:

Implementation:

c = 0
# Opening our text file in read only mode
with open(r'SampleFile.txt','r') as file:
    data = file.read()
    
    w = data.split()
    
    c += len(w)
print(c)

Output: 

7

Explanation: 

• The file is opened in read-only mode using open(file_name, 'r').
• read() function reads the entire content of the file and stores it in the variable data.
• split() function splits the content into words based on spaces, storing them in the list "w".
• The length of "w" is calculated and added to "c", representing the total word count in the file.

Example 2: Count the number of words, not Integer

Implementation: 

c = 0
# Opening our text file in read only mode
with open(r'SampleFile.txt','r') as file:
    data = file.read()
    lines = data.split()
    # Iterating over every word in lines
    for word in lines:
        # checking if the word is numeric or not
        if not word.isnumeric():          
            c += 1
print(c)

Output:

11

Explanation:

• File is opened in read-only mode. Content is read and split into words.
• We iterate through each word and check if it is numeric using the isnumeric() function. If the word is not numeric, we increment the word count.
• Final count of non-numeric words is printed , the file contains 11 non-numeric words (excluding the numbers and colon is not an integer so it is counted).