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LESSON 379 OF 410 · PROJECTS: COMMAND-LINE TOOLS

CLI Tool: wc v3 — Count Characters in JavaScript

Practice

Build a tiny version of the character count of the Unix wc command. Given a list of lines, return the total number of characters across all lines as an integer.

Convention: count only the characters in each line — do not count the implicit newlines that separate them. Spaces and tabs inside a line count as one character each.

Note: this is a simplified version. The real wc -m also counts the newlines, and the real wc -c counts bytes, not characters. Here the answer is simply the sum of the line lengths. The input is plain ASCII text (other alphabets are counted differently by different languages).

Function signature:

countChars(lines)

Example:

Input: lines = ["hello", "world"]

Output: 10

"hello" has 5 chars and "world" has 5 chars, for a total of 10.

An empty line adds 0, and an empty list of lines gives 0.


Loop through the lines and accumulate line.length into a running total. No need to count separators.

The full solution:
class Solution {
    countChars(lines) {
        let total = 0;
        for (const line of lines) {
            total += line.length;
        }
        return total;
    }
}

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    Wc V3 in JavaScript

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