Counting the characters of a text with multiple lines

Question

There is a text that is like:

hi hi
hi hi
hi hi

The program is supposed to find 12 characters but it prints 14. I have found a different solution to my question but I didn't understand why this code doesn't work:

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.PrintWriter;
import java.util.Scanner;

public class Learn {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws FileNotFoundException {
        // variables
        String inName;
        File input;
        int counter;
        String str;

        // program code
        // #1 How many characters
        Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);
        System.out.print("Please enter the file name: ");
        inName = scan.nextLine();
        input = new File(inName);
        scan.close();
        scan = new Scanner(input);
        scan.useDelimiter("");
        counter = 0;
        while (scan.hasNext()) {
            str = scan.next();
            if (!str.equals(" ") && !str.equals("\n"))
                counter++;
        }
        System.out.println(counter);
    }
}

Answer 1

It's prefer to use System.lineSeparator() to declare the line separator because it's different in different os and check the empty string using .trim()

Update the condition to the following:

From:

if (!str.equals(" ") && !str.equals("\n"))

, To:

if (!"".equals(str.trim()) && !str.equals(System.lineSeparator()))

Answer 2

New lines can be represented using different Control characters \ Escape sequence. Your code doesn't work properly as it only takes \n into account which denotes line feed. Carriage return is represented by \r . You can fix your code by checking for carriage return as well by changing

if (.str.equals(" ") && !str.equals("\n") )

to

if (.str.equals(" ") &&.str.equals("\n") && !str.equals("\r") )

This way, you will be handling for both CR and LF control characters. If you are interested in learning more about this, check this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline