Q:

Find the number of characters in a file using Python

Here is the question:
I have a file with these words:
hey how are you
I am fine and you
Yes I am fine

And it is asked to find the number of words, lines and characters.
Below is my program, but the number of counts for the characters without space is not correct.
The number of words is correct and the number of line is correct.
What is the mistake in the same loop?
fname = input("Enter the name of the file:")
infile = open(fname, 'r')
lines = 0
words = 0
characters = 0
for line in infile:
    wordslist = line.split()
    lines = lines + 1
    words = words + len(wordslist)
    characters = characters + len(line)
print(lines)
print(words)
print(characters)

The output is:
lines=3(Correct)
words=13(correct)
characters=47

I've looked on the site with multiple answers and I am confused because I didn't learn some other functions in Python. How do I correct the code as simple and basic as it is in the loop I've done?
Whereas the number of characters without space is 35 and with space is 45.
If possible, I want to find the number of characters without space. Even if someone know the loop for the number of characters with space that's fine.

A:

Sum up the length of all words in a line:
characters += sum(len(word) for word in wordslist)

The whole program:
with open('my_words.txt') as infile:
    lines=0
    words=0
    characters=0
    for line in infile:
        wordslist=line.split()
        lines=lines+1
        words=words+len(wordslist)
        characters += sum(len(word) for word in wordslist)
print(lines)
print(words)
print(characters)

Output:
3
13
35

This:
(len(word) for word in wordslist)

is a generator expression. It is essentially a loop in one line that produces the length of each word. We feed these lengths directly to sum:
sum(len(word) for word in wordslist)

Improved version
This version takes advantage of enumerate, so you save two lines of code, while keeping the readability:
with open('my_words.txt') as infile:
    words = 0
    characters = 0
    for lineno, line in enumerate(infile, 1):
        wordslist = line.split()
        words += len(wordslist)
        characters += sum(len(word) for word in wordslist)

print(lineno)
print(words)
print(characters)

This line:
with open('my_words.txt') as infile:

opens the file with the promise to close it as soon as you leave indentation.
It is always good practice to close file after your are done using it.

A:

Remember that each line (except for the last) has a line separator.
I.e. "\r\n" for Windows or "\n" for Linux and Mac.
Thus, exactly two characters are added in this case, as 47 and not 45.
A nice way to overcome this could be to use:
import os

fname=input("enter the name of the file:")
infile=open(fname, 'r')
lines=0
words=0
characters=0
for line in infile:
    line = line.strip(os.linesep)
    wordslist=line.split()
    lines=lines+1
    words=words+len(wordslist)
    characters=characters+ len(line)
print(lines)
print(words)
print(characters)

A:

To count the characters, you should count each individual word. So you could have another loop that counts characters:
for word in wordslist:
    characters += len(word)

That ought to do it. The wordslist should probably take away newline characters on the right, something like wordslist = line.rstrip().split() perhaps.

