How to Get Number of Lines in a File in Python

1. Get Number of Lines in a File in Python Using the open() and sum() Functions
2. Get Number of Lines in a File in Python Using the mmap.mmap() Method
3. Get Number of Lines in a File in Python Using the file.read() Method

This tutorial will demonstrate various methods to get the total number of lines in a file in Python. To get the total number of lines of a file, we first need to read the data of the file in a buffer, and we can do so by either loading the complete file at once or read the data in small chunks if the file size is large.

We will look at how we can implement both approaches using various methods in Python, which are explained below with example code:

Get Number of Lines in a File in Python Using the open() and sum() Functions

A simple way to get the number of lines in a file is by iterating through each line of the file object returned by the open() function.

The open(file, mode) function takes file as input and returns a file object as output. A file is a path-like object that can be a string or bytes object and contains the file path. The mode represents the mode we want to open the file, like read, write, append mode, etc.

The below example code demonstrates how to use the for loop to get the number of lines in a file in Python.

with open("myFolder/myfile.txt") as myfile:
    total_lines = sum(1 for line in myfile)

print(total_lines)

Get Number of Lines in a File in Python Using the mmap.mmap() Method

The mmap.mmap(fileno, length) method maps length number of bytes from the file specified by the fileno and returns a mmap object. If the value of length is 0, the maximum length of the map will be equal to the file size.

We can use the mmap object returned by the mmap.mmap() method and then use the mm.readline() method to access the lines until we reach the end of the file. As we want to load the complete file, we will pass 0 as the length argument.

Example code:

import mmap

with open("myFolder/myfile.txt", "r+") as myfile:
    mm = mmap.mmap(myfile.fileno(), 0)
    total_lines = 0

    while mm.readline():
        total_lines += 1

print(total_lines)

Get Number of Lines in a File in Python Using the file.read() Method

If the file size is huge and we need a fast way to read the file in small chunks, we can use the file.read() method to read the data as a byte array into a buffer with the specified size.

The below example code demonstrates how to read the file data into a buffer using the file.read() method and then iterate through it to get the number of lines:

lines = 0
size = 1024 * 1024

with open(r"C:\test\file.txt", "r+") as myfile:
    read_file = myfile.read

    buffer = read_file(size)

    while buffer:
        lines += buffer.count("\n")
        buffer = read_file(size)

if lines != 0:
    lines += 1

print(lines)