Input the file and count the characters

Question

I am writing a code that calculates how many words in a file

And my problem is: when I input the file, there will have more word than the original file...For example, in the file, the content is abcdabcd, but when I run the code, the console shows Total no. of letters: 194

I am using netbeans IDE and mac, when I click the blank space instead of directly open the file, I found there are many words in front of abcdabcd, I guess perhaps this is the reason... But I don't know how to fix this problem on my code [![enter image description here][1]][1]

Can anyone help me solve this problem?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The input file is encoded with rtf (Rich Text Format), despite it being saved with a .txt extension. This encoding is commonly used to do many things plain text cannot do, such as bold and italic etc. However, to accomplish this, the file is filled with all sorts of other things to accompany the normal text, in your case "abcdef". Of course, java reads all of this as if it were a plain text file, and ends up counting all of the rtf formatting as well.

I assume you're using TextEdit, so look at this tutorial to see how to use only plain text, so all of the extra formatting is not included in the final file.

Hope this helped :)