How do the count the number of sentences, words and characters in a file?

Question

I have written the following code to tokenize the input paragraph that comes from the file samp.txt. Can anybody help me out to find and print the number of sentences, words and characters in the file? I have used NLTK in python for this.

>>>import nltk.data
>>>import nltk.tokenize
>>>f=open('samp.txt')
>>>raw=f.read()
>>>tokenized_sentences=nltk.sent_tokenize(raw)
>>>for each_sentence in tokenized_sentences:
...   words=nltk.tokenize.word_tokenize(each_sentence)
...   print each_sentence   #prints tokenized sentences from samp.txt
>>>tokenized_words=nltk.word_tokenize(raw)
>>>for each_word in tokenized_words:
...   words=nltk.tokenize.word_tokenize(each_word)
...   print each_words      #prints tokenized words from samp.txt

Answer 1

Try it this way (this program assumes that you are working with one text file in the directory specified by dirpath):

import nltk
folder = nltk.data.find(dirpath)
corpusReader = nltk.corpus.PlaintextCorpusReader(folder, '.*\.txt')

print "The number of sentences =", len(corpusReader.sents())
print "The number of patagraphs =", len(corpusReader.paras())
print "The number of words =", len([word for sentence in corpusReader.sents() for word in sentence])
print "The number of characters =", len([char for sentence in corpusReader.sents() for word in sentence for char in word])

Hope this helps

Answer 2

With nltk, you can also use FreqDist (see O'Reillys Book Ch3.1)

And in your case:

import nltk
raw = open('samp.txt').read()
raw = nltk.Text(nltk.word_tokenize(raw.decode('utf-8')))
fdist = nltk.FreqDist(raw)
print fdist.N()

Answer 3

For what it's worth if someone comes along here. This addresses all that the OP's question asked I think. If one uses the textstat package, counting sentences and characters is very easy. There is a certain importance for punctuation at the end of each sentence.

import textstat

your_text = "This is a sentence! This is sentence two. And this is the final sentence?"
print("Num sentences:", textstat.sentence_count(your_text))
print("Num chars:", textstat.char_count(your_text, ignore_spaces=True))
print("Num words:", len(your_text.split()))