Determine the number of lines within a text file

Question

Is there an easy way to programmatically determine the number of lines within a text file?

Answer 1

Seriously belated edit: If you're using .NET 4.0 or later

The File class has a new ReadLines method which lazily enumerates lines rather than greedily reading them all into an array like ReadAllLines. So now you can have both efficiency and conciseness with:

var lineCount = File.ReadLines(@"C:\file.txt").Count();

---

Original Answer

If you're not too bothered about efficiency, you can simply write:

var lineCount = File.ReadAllLines(@"C:\file.txt").Length;

For a more efficient method you could do:

var lineCount = 0;
using (var reader = File.OpenText(@"C:\file.txt"))
{
    while (reader.ReadLine() != null)
    {
        lineCount++;
    }
}

Edit: In response to questions about efficiency

The reason I said the second was more efficient was regarding memory usage, not necessarily speed. The first one loads the entire contents of the file into an array which means it must allocate at least as much memory as the size of the file. The second merely loops one line at a time so it never has to allocate more than one line's worth of memory at a time. This isn't that important for small files, but for larger files it could be an issue (if you try and find the number of lines in a 4GB file on a 32-bit system, for example, where there simply isn't enough user-mode address space to allocate an array this large).

In terms of speed I wouldn't expect there to be a lot in it. It's possible that ReadAllLines has some internal optimisations, but on the other hand it may have to allocate a massive chunk of memory. I'd guess that ReadAllLines might be faster for small files, but significantly slower for large files; though the only way to tell would be to measure it with a Stopwatch or code profiler.

Answer 2

The easiest:

int lines = File.ReadAllLines("myfile").Length;

Answer 3

This would use less memory, but probably take longer

int count = 0;
string line;
TextReader reader = new StreamReader("file.txt");
while ((line = reader.ReadLine()) != null)
{
  count++;
}
reader.Close();

Answer 4

If by easy you mean a lines of code that are easy to decipher but per chance inefficient?

string[] lines = System.IO.File.RealAllLines($filename);
int cnt = lines.Count();

That's probably the quickest way to know how many lines.

You could also do (depending on if you are buffering it in)

#for large files
while (...reads into buffer){
string[] lines = Regex.Split(buffer,System.Enviorment.NewLine);
}

There are other numerous ways but one of the above is probably what you'll go with.

Answer 5

You could quickly read it in, and increment a counter, just use a loop to increment, doing nothing with the text.

Answer 6

count the carriage returns/line feeds. I believe in unicode they are still 0x000D and 0x000A respectively. that way you can be as efficient or as inefficient as you want, and decide if you have to deal with both characters or not

Answer 7

A viable option, and one that I have personally used, would be to add your own header to the first line of the file. I did this for a custom model format for my game. Basically, I have a tool that optimizes my .obj files, getting rid of the crap I don't need, converts them to a better layout, and then writes the total number of lines, faces, normals, vertices, and texture UVs on the very first line. That data is then used by various array buffers when the model is loaded.

This is also useful because you only need to loop through the file once to load it in, instead of once to count the lines, and again to read the data into your created buffers.

Answer 8

Reading a file in and by itself takes some time, garbage collecting the result is another problem as you read the whole file just to count the newline character(s),

At some point, someone is going to have to read the characters in the file, regardless if this the framework or if it is your code. This means you have to open the file and read it into memory if the file is large this is going to potentially be a problem as the memory needs to be garbage collected.

Nima Ara made a nice analysis that you might take into consideration

Here is the solution proposed, as it reads 4 characters at a time, counts the line feed character and re-uses the same memory address again for the next character comparison.

private const char CR = '\r';  
private const char LF = '\n';  
private const char NULL = (char)0;

public static long CountLinesMaybe(Stream stream)  
{
    Ensure.NotNull(stream, nameof(stream));

    var lineCount = 0L;

    var byteBuffer = new byte[1024 * 1024];
    const int BytesAtTheTime = 4;
    var detectedEOL = NULL;
    var currentChar = NULL;

    int bytesRead;
    while ((bytesRead = stream.Read(byteBuffer, 0, byteBuffer.Length)) > 0)
    {
        var i = 0;
        for (; i <= bytesRead - BytesAtTheTime; i += BytesAtTheTime)
        {
            currentChar = (char)byteBuffer[i];

            if (detectedEOL != NULL)
            {
                if (currentChar == detectedEOL) { lineCount++; }

                currentChar = (char)byteBuffer[i + 1];
                if (currentChar == detectedEOL) { lineCount++; }

                currentChar = (char)byteBuffer[i + 2];
                if (currentChar == detectedEOL) { lineCount++; }

                currentChar = (char)byteBuffer[i + 3];
                if (currentChar == detectedEOL) { lineCount++; }
            }
            else
            {
                if (currentChar == LF || currentChar == CR)
                {
                    detectedEOL = currentChar;
                    lineCount++;
                }
                i -= BytesAtTheTime - 1;
            }
        }

        for (; i < bytesRead; i++)
        {
            currentChar = (char)byteBuffer[i];

            if (detectedEOL != NULL)
            {
                if (currentChar == detectedEOL) { lineCount++; }
            }
            else
            {
                if (currentChar == LF || currentChar == CR)
                {
                    detectedEOL = currentChar;
                    lineCount++;
                }
            }
        }
    }

    if (currentChar != LF && currentChar != CR && currentChar != NULL)
    {
        lineCount++;
    }
    return lineCount;
}

Above you can see that a line is read one character at a time as well by the underlying framework as you need to read all characters to see the line feed.

If you profile it as done bay Nima you would see that this is a rather fast and efficient way of doing this.

Answer 9

try {
    string path = args[0];
    FileStream fh = new FileStream(path, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read);
    int i;
    string s = "";
    while ((i = fh.ReadByte()) != -1)
        s = s + (char)i;

    //its for reading number of paragraphs
    int count = 0;
    for (int j = 0; j < s.Length - 1; j++) {
            if (s.Substring(j, 1) == "\n")
                count++;
    }

    Console.WriteLine("The total searches were :" + count);

    fh.Close();

} catch(Exception ex) {
    Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
}         

Answer 10

You can launch the "wc.exe" executable (comes with UnixUtils and does not need installation) run as an external process. It supports different line count methods (like unix vs mac vs windows).