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Examples

Get Number of Lines in File in Python (Line Count)

Finding the line count of a file in Python is a common requirement when working with text files. Whether you're analyzing data, performing text processing, or simply curious about the size of a file, knowing how to get number of lines in file can be highly useful. 

In this post, we will learn to count number of lines in a file in Python, allowing you to efficiently analyze and work with files of any size.

Python provides straightforward methods and techniques to obtain the line count of a file, making it easy to process files and gather important statistics. By using these methods, you can iterate through the lines of a file and count them, even for large files that may not fit into memory all at once.

Get Number of Lines in File in Python

Code

ef count_lines_in_file(file_path):
    try:
        with open(file_path, 'r') as file:
            line_count = 0
            for _ in file:
                line_count += 1
        return line_count
    except IOError as e:
        print(f"Unable to read file. {e}")
        return None

# Example usage
file_path = "/path/to/file.txt"
num_lines = count_lines_in_file(file_path)
if num_lines is not None:
    print("Number of lines:", num_lines)

Output

Depends on file

Explanation

In the above program, the count_lines_in_file() function takes the file path as an argument. It opens the file using the open() function with the 'r' mode to open it in read mode. Then, it iterates over each line in the file using a for loop, incrementing the line_count variable for each line encountered.

Finally, the function returns the line_count, which represents the total number of lines in the file. If there is an IOError while reading the file, it prints an error message and returns None.

To use this program, replace "/path/to/file.txt" with the actual file path for which you want to count the lines. The program will then print the number of lines in the file.

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