Counting every word in a text file and outputting a cost

Question

My friend does writing commissions and charges per word. I wanted to write a script that could do the calculations for him. I am trying to count every individual word in the text file. It reads the first line only and ignores the rest.

My python knowledge is minimal, but I think I'm on the right track. I think I have to somehow use readlines() to re-read the file every couple seconds.

import math
import time

def count():
    txt = input("What is your file name?\nNote: file must be in same location as script\n")
    file = open(txt,"r")
    word_list = file.read().split(',')
    word_count = len(word_list)
    words = word_count
    file.close
    return words


def output(items):
    file = open("livecost.txt","w")
    total = items * .02
    file.write(format(total, ".2f"))




def main():
    num = int()
    print("Lanching script")
    while num < 1000000:
        output(count())
        num = num + 1
        time.sleep(1)

main()

The wanted outcome is for the script to run in an infinite loop of rechecking the text file wordcount, and outputting the calculated cost. The only problem is figuring that out.

Answer 1

this is enaugh for counting words:

def countwords(txtdir):
    with open(txtdir) as f:
        return len(f.read().split())

its better with no output function

def main(txtdir):
    print("Lanching script")
    with open("livecost.txt","w") as f:
        for num in range(1000000):
            f.write("{} \n".format(countwords(txtdir)))
            time.sleep(1)

full code:

import time,datetime

def countwords(txtdir):
    with open(txtdir) as f:
        return len(f.read().split())

def main(txtdir):
    print("Lanching script")
    with open("livecost.txt","w") as f:
        for num in range(1000000):
            f.write("{}\t{}\n".format(datetime.datetime.now(),countwords(txtdir)))
            time.sleep(1)

main("What is your file name?\nNote: file must be in same location as script\n")