Ruby - Counting Words in Text File

Introduction

To get the number of words in the string, you can use the length or size array methods to count the number of elements rather than join them together:

puts "this is a test".scan(/\w+/).length #4 

Let's split the string by spaces and get the length of the resulting array, like so:

puts "this is a test".split.length 

By default, split will split by whitespace, single or multiple characters of spaces, tabs, newlines, and so on.

Demo

lines = File.readlines("main.rb") 
line_count = lines.size # from w  w w  .  j  a  v  a  2  s  . co  m
text = lines.join 

word_count = text.split.length 
puts "#{word_count} words"

Result

Related Topic

• Output text file line by line
• Count text file line
• Read whole text file to memory
• Count Text File Characters
• Count characters excluding whitespace
• Counting Sentences and Paragraphs in Text file
• Standard Input and Output
• Text Files Reading
• Split file by ,
• Output file byte by type
• Read text file character by character
• Read an I/O stream line by line using gets
• Read entire file into an array, split by lines, using readlines
• Read an arbitrary number of bytes from a file
• Reading text file line by line using each
• Read file in UTF8
• Transcoding from one encoding to another encoding.

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