C Program to Count the Number of Lines in a File

In this tutorial, we will write a C Program to find the number of lines in a text file. Before that, you may go through the following C topics.

• C file I/O

Explanation: The program asks the user to enter the file name or file path (if not present in the same directory). If the file is not present then it will throw a message else it will continue the counting process.

First, the file checks if the starting is EOF or not, if not then the count will increase to 1 (if this part is not checked then the count will show one less result than the actual number of lines present), and then the counting begins using a while loop. And it increases the count when a newline is found every time inside a file.

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C Program to Count the Number of Lines in a File

Source code: Count the number of lines in a file in C

#include <stdio.h>
#define FILE_NAME_SIZE 100

int main()
{
   FILE * fptr;
   int count = 0;
   char fileName[FILE_NAME_SIZE], ch;

   printf("Enter the name of the file: ");
   scanf("%s", fileName);

   // Opening the file and check for its existence
   fptr = fopen(fileName, "r");
   if (fptr == NULL)
   {
      printf("Could not open file.");
      return 0;
   }

   ch = getc(fptr);
   //if file is not empty then count the first line as 1
   if (ch != EOF)
      count++;

   // extracting the lines
   while (ch != EOF)
   {
      // if character id newline
      if (ch == '\n' || ch == '\0')
         count = count + 1;

      ch = getc(fptr);
   }

   fclose(fptr);
   printf("Number of line present in %s: %d ", fileName, count);

   return 0;
}

Output:

The content inside the test.txt:

Hello!
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