Alex said:
If you tell it to count non-lines too (pieces that don't end with an
endline marker), it does, of course:
My reply was meant to be a bit of a jest, pointing out that
I'm using Python's definition of a line. Otherwise if
lines must end with a newline then the method should be
named "readlines_and_any_trailing_text()"
Since you used
numlines=0
for line in file('/usr/share/dict/words'): numlines+=1
as a way to count lines, I assumed you would agree with
Python's definition as a reasonable way to count the
number of lines in a file and that your previous post
(on the behavior of wc) was meant more as a rhetorical
way to highlight the ambiguity than as an assertion of
general correctness.
I suspect somebody who asks the subject question wants to reproduce wc's
counting behavior.
Really? I was actually surprised at what wc does. I didn't
realize it only did a "\n" character count. The other programs
I know of number based on the start of line rather than end
of line.
% echo -n "blah" > blah.txt
% less blah.txt
(then press "=")
blah.txt lines 1-1/1 byte 4/4 (END) (press RETURN)
% echo -n "" | perl -ne '$line++; END{$line+=0;print "$line\n"}'
0
% echo -n "blah" | perl -ne '$line++; END{$line+=0;print "$line\n"}'
1
% echo -n "" | awk 'END {print NR}'
0
% echo -n "blah" | awk 'END {print NR}'
1
% echo -n "blah" | grep -n "blah"
1:blah
> Of course, it _is_ an imprecise spec they're giving.
Yup.
Andrew
(e-mail address removed)
