Hi guys, Basically I've loaded a file, and using a while(<filename>){ } i've counted the number of lines. However, what I want to do now is read the number of characters in the file (not including the new line so I will be using a chomp command also. How would I do this?

Also, when I am reading each character, how do I search for a specific one? For example, how would I search for all the commas in the file?

Thanks

You probably have

while ($line = <FH>(
$count++; }

change it to

while ($line = <FH>(
$count+=length($line); }

and you'll count the characters instead!

You don't need to count lines in a file, perl does that and stores the line number in the perl var $. (that is a dollar sign followed by a dot).

As far as counting characters and or searching for a character, what have you tried so far?

thanks for the help guys, I tried the length(), but it seems to also count the whitespaces along with the \n

I've eliminated the \n using chomp, however, the whitespace is a problem, I don't know how to make the script ignore the whitespace and count the other characters.

I will not help you anymore unless you post the code you have written so far.

---