Feb 08 2008
Character Counter
Whilst reading an article I was curious about the number of commas and full-stops that the author used – when you become an editor of a newsletter you start to think about things like this. After hunting around the various utilities on my system I discovered that I didn’t have anything that could easily do this. So, I did what any self-respecting programmer would do and threw together a quick app to do it for me.
I have made both the source code and pre-compiled binary available for download under a BSD license (share, remix, no endorsement). It is written in C# and requires the .Net 2.0 framework, if you want to compile the source you will probably require MS Visual Studio (Express should be ok), although it may work with SharpDevelop or Mono.
It is a console application (sorry, no pretty GUI this time) that reads the contents of input.txt (in the same directory as the app), it then counts the occurrences of each character and outputs the results to the console. Simple!
If you make any improvements to the code please leave a comment and/or email the changes to me: gringod [at] gmail [dot] com.