Count how many characters are in the program's source

Question

Write a program that counts and prints the number of characters in it's own source code to standard output.

The number must be generated from counting the characters.

This Ruby solution would not be allowed:

puts 6

because it is not calculated. Spaces, tabs, new lines, etc should be counted.

The program must be smallest possible in any programming language.

Answer 1

Bash, 10

Pretty boring, but:

• Prints the code size in bytes, and nothing else.
• Filename may contain spaces.

Make sure that the file doesn't have a new line at the end! If it does, it will output 11.

wc -c<"$0"

If the file doesn't have spaces in its name, you can get 8 characters:

wc -c<$0

Answer 2

CJam / GolfScript - 11

CJam:

{`"_~"+,}_~

GolfScript:

{`".~"+,}.~

This actually generates its own source code (like a quine) and then calculates the string length.

Answer 3

PYG (9, and actually calculated)

Calculates the length of the source code (Q) with the builtin string length checker len, and prints (P) the result:

P(len(Q))

Answer 4

Ruby, 30 22 20 18

p IO.read($0)=~/$/

Answer 5

perl, 9 bytes

No trailing newline.

print-s$0

Running it looks like this:

$ echo -n 'print-s$0' >/tmp/foo.pl
$ perl /tmp/foo.pl ; echo
9

Answer 6

BASH (builtins only) - 18

$ cat bash ; echo # no final newline in file
a=`<$0`
echo ${#a}
$ ls -l bash 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 yeti yeti 18 18. Mai 07:11 bash
$ ./bash 
18

Answer 7

Fortran 78

character*78::a;open(unit=9,file='c.f90');read(9,'(a78)')a;print*,len(a);end

File IO isn't the best in Fortran, so we have to waste space opening the file & then reading from it. Had I not specified the a78 (78 characters), then it would stop at the comma next to file (silly list-directed IO).

Answer 8

HTML + Javascript (jQuery): 48

Save this script as script.html and open it with a browser.

<script>alert($('body').html().length)</script>

Answer 9

Python 31

Save the file as 'l'

print len(file.read(file('l')))

Outputs 34

Answer 10

Rebol, 40

print length? read system/options/script

Answer 11

VIM - 43

Add this in your .vimrc file :

:echo strlen(join(readfile(".vimrc")),"\n")

But it will only work if you are in your home when executing vim.

More generic solution vim ~/.vimrc (46 chars) :

:echo strlen(join(readfile(bufname("%")),"\n"))

Answer 12

PHP - 22

<?=filesize(__FILE__);

Answer 13

Python 3, 28 27 bytes

I got 2̶8̶ 27 characters, plus file name and extension (4 in this case for 'f.py') The minimum value for this is 3̶2̶ 31, if there was a 1 letter file name and the .py exension:

print(len(open("f.py").read()))

EDIT: The bite count is actually 27 rather than 28, thanks @mbomb007 for pointing that out

Answer 14

JavaScript 78

<script id="s">
function f(){document.write(document.getElementById("s").innerHTML.length);}
</script>

Answer 15

J - 16 char

J can read($0) itself too, you know! Not all that well, but...

echo#1!:1]1{ARGV

A more natural solution in the interpreter REPL, in which we do the normal quine thing and then take the length, costs 24 chars:

#(,2#{:),~'#(,2#{:),~'''

,~ appends the string to itself, (,2#{:) appends two copies of the trailing single quote, and # takes the length.

Answer 16

Extended BrainFuck: 12

,(>+<,)>55+.

Usage:

beef ebf.bf < cnt.ebf > cnt.bf
beef cnt.bf < ent.ebf

Output:

C

Which is 12 in hex. If you add a linefeed in the file it will output a D for 13 so it's definitely counting the characters in the source.

Answer 17

Hy (38 characters):

(defmain [n] (print (.read (open n))))

Answer 18

dc - 8

Not sure if this is allowed, but calculates the length of the macro(the part in the square brackets and adds 4(which is the length of the part outside the macro)).

[Z4+p]dx

Answer 19

Lua: 42

print(string.len(io.open('l',"r"):read()))

Pretty straight-forward, you must save the file as l and call it as lua l.

Answer 20

K,13

1@$#,/0:.z.f;

/

$ q a.k -q
13

Answer 21

Python 3: 33 or 37

print(len(open(__file__).read()))
print(len(open(__file__,'b').read()))

First if you only count the characters, second if you want to count the number of bytes.

Answer 22

JavaScript (Node.js) - 60

console.log(require('fs').readFileSync(__filename).length);

Answer 23

Java, 157 characters

Since nobody has done Java yet...

public class A{public static void main(String[]a) throws Exception{System.out.print(new java.util.Scanner(new java.io.File("A.java")).nextLine().length());}}

Answer 24

PHP - 44

Save this as c

<?$f=fopen("c","r");echo strlen(fgets($f));

Answer 25

JavaScript

42 - ES5

(function a(){alert((a+"()()").length)})()

37 - ES6

(a=x=>{alert((a+"(a=)()").length)})()

Answer 26

Javascript (pure - no HTML nor JQuery) 41 bytes

function f() {alert((f+"f()").length)}f()

Answer 27

awk, 13 bytes

$0=length($0)

Write it to a program file program.awk and

$ awk -f program.awk program.awk
13

Answer 28

RProgN, 3 bytes.

Q L

Simply, Q is the function that pushes the source code to the stack, and L is the function that gets the length of the string on top of the stack. The stack is then implicitly printed.

Try it online!

Answer 29

Dyalog APL, 8 bytes

The niladic function f:

≢∊⎕NR'f'

Notice that this prints 10 because APL counts (and stores) the function header (name + newline). However, PPCG practice is not to count this header. The entire program can be displayed with

      ↑⎕NR'f'

Giving:

f
≢∊⎕NR'f'

---

⎕NR'f' the Nested (i.e. a list of character lists) Representation of f

∊ ϵnlist (flatten)

≢ tally