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:
def countChars(self, lines: List[str]) -> int:
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.
Sum the length of every line. Python's
sum combined with a generator expression makes this a one-liner.
The full solution:
class Solution:
def countChars(self, lines):
return sum(len(line) for line in lines)
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