Text File I/O Question

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Berk Öztürk
Berk Öztürk on 26 Dec 2022
Commented: Voss on 27 Dec 2022
Question : Write a function called char_counter that counts the number of a certain character in a text file. The function takes two input arguments, fname, a char vector of the filename and character, the char it counts in the file. The function returns charnum, the number of characters found. If the file is not found or character is not a valid char, the function return -1. As an example, consider the following run. The file "simple.txt" contains a single line:"This file should have exactly three a-s..." ,
charnum = char_counter('simple.txt,'a')
charnum =
3
My code is below and passed all tests but I want to know if there is a pitfall in my code or a way to do it smarter. Thanks in advance.
function charnum = char_counter(fname,character)
charnum = 0;
if ischar(character)==0
charnum=-1;
return;
end
fid=fopen(fname,'rt');
if fid<0
charnum = -1;
return;
end
oneline = fgets(fid);
while ischar(oneline)
for ii=1:length(oneline)
if oneline(ii)==character
charnum = charnum + 1;
else
continue;
end
end
oneline = fgets(fid);
end
fclose(fid);
  1 Comment
Voss
Voss on 27 Dec 2022
The
else
continue;
block is unnecessary.

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Accepted Answer

Voss
Voss on 26 Dec 2022
You don't need to go line-by-line and character-by-character, you can read the entire file at once and count the total number of occurrences of character like this:
charnum = nnz(fread(fid,'*char') == character);
If you do that, your function might look something like this:
function charnum = char_counter(fname,character)
if ~ischar(character) || ~isscalar(character)
charnum = -1;
return
end
fid = fopen(fname,'rt');
if fid < 0
charnum = -1;
return
end
charnum = nnz(fread(fid,'*char') == character);
fclose(fid);

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