How to count Words, Paragraphs, Sentences, Characters, White Spaces in a Text File using Java

Last Updated on May 5th, 2021 at 05:24 pm

Introduction

Here I will create a sample program to count words, paragraphs, sentences, characters, white spaces in a text file using Java programming language.

In this tutorial I will read a simple text file and count number of words, paragraphs, characters etc.

Prerequisites

Java

Count in File

Now I will create Java program to count words, paragraphs, white spaces etc.

The below source code simply presents a method which takes a File input and read each line from the file and count the desired things.

In the below code I have used different separators for counting the words, paragraphs, sentences, etc.

package com.roytuts.java.count.word.para.sentence.whitespace.text.file;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;

public class JavaCountWordParaSentenceWhitespaceTextFile {

	public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
		countWordParaSentenceWhitespaceTextFile(new File("sample.txt"));
	}

	public static void countWordParaSentenceWhitespaceTextFile(final File file) throws IOException {
		BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(file)));

		String line;
		int countWord = 0;
		int sentenceCount = 0;
		int characterCount = 0;
		int paragraphCount = 1;
		int whitespaceCount = 0;

		while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {

			if (line.equals("")) {
				paragraphCount++;
			} else {
				characterCount += line.length();

				String[] wordList = line.split("\\s+");

				countWord += wordList.length;

				whitespaceCount += countWord - 1;

				String[] sentenceList = line.split("[!?.:]+");

				sentenceCount += sentenceList.length;
			}

		}

		br.close();

		System.out.println("Total number of words = " + countWord);

		System.out.println("Total number of sentences = " + sentenceCount);

		System.out.println("Total number of characters = " + characterCount);

		System.out.println("Total number of paragraphs = " + paragraphCount);

		System.out.println("Total number of whitespaces = " + whitespaceCount);
	}
}

Testing the Program

Now I will just pass a sample text file and call the above method. The sample.txt file is kept on the root folder of the project name or the project folder.

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
	countWordParaSentenceWhitespaceTextFile(new File("sample.txt"));
}

Executing the above main method will give you below output:

Total number of words = 53
Total number of sentences = 5
Total number of characters = 276
Total number of paragraphs = 3
Total number of whitespaces = 137

That’s all about how to count words, paragraphs, sentences, white spaces by reading a text file.

Source Code

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