Total number of lines and words in a file

Question

I have an exercise that is asking to calculate the number of lines and words in an email file, excluding the subject line.

I can get the total number of lines and words with the following code:

file = "email.txt" 
num_lines = 0
num_words = 0
with open(file, 'r') as f:
    for line in f:
        words = line.split() 
        if not line.startswith ('Subject'):
                num_lines += 1
                num_words += len(words)
        
print(num_lines)
print(num_words)

I would like to define a function to get the same information however, the second function for the word count is not return the desired value.

textFile = "email.txt"

def count_lines():
    with open (textFile, 'r') as file:
        num_lines = 0
        for line in file:
            words = line.split()
            if not line.startswith ('Subject'):
                num_lines = num_lines + 1
        return num_lines

def count_words():
    with open (textFile, 'r') as file:
        num_words = 0
        for words in file:
            words = line.split()
            if not line.startswith ('Subject'):
                num_words = num_words + 1
        return num_words

print(count_lines())
print(count_words())
        

Answer 1

I would suggest you another solution, using list comprehension:

with open(textFile, 'r') as f:
    words_per_line = [len(line.split()) for line in f.readlines() if not line.startswith('Subject')]
    total_lines = len(words_per_line)
    total_words = sum(words_per_line)

Where words_per_line contains number of words per line in your file so if you count it ( len ) you will get the number of lines and if you sum it, you will get the total number of words.