Calculate bytes of the unicode character in python

If you need to know the bytes count (the file size) then just call
bytes_count = os.path.getsize(filename).

If you want to find out how many bytes a Unicode character may require then it depends on character encoding:

>>> print(u"\N{EURO SIGN}") € >>> u"\N{EURO SIGN}".encode('utf-8') # 3 bytes '\xe2\x82\xac' >>> u"\N{EURO SIGN}".encode('cp1252') # 1 byte '\x80' >>> u"\N{EURO SIGN}".encode('utf-16le') # 2 bytes '\xac ' 

To find out how many Unicode characters a file contains, you don't need to read the whole file in memory at once (in case it is a large file):

with open(filename, encoding=character_encoding) as file: unicode_character_count = sum(len(line) for line in file) 

If you are on Python 2 then add from io import open at the top.

The exact count for the same human-readable text may depend on Unicode normalization (different environments may use different settings):

>>> import unicodedata >>> print(u"\u212b") Å >>> unicodedata.normalize("NFD", u"\u212b") # 2 Unicode codepoints u'A\u030a' >>> unicodedata.normalize("NFC", u"\u212b") # 1 Unicode codepoint u'\xc5' >>> unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", u"\u212b") # 2 Unicode codepoints u'A\u030a' >>> unicodedata.normalize("NFKC", u"\u212b") # 1 Unicode codepoint u'\xc5' 

As the example shows, a single character (Å) may be represented using several Unicode codepoints.

To find out how many user-perceived characters in a file, you could use \X regular expression (count eXtended grapheme clusters):

import regex # $ pip install regex with open(filename, encoding=character_encoding) as file: character_count = sum(len(regex.findall(r'\X', line)) for line in file) 

Example:

>>> import regex >>> char = u'A\u030a' >>> print(char) Å >>> len(char) 2 >>> regex.findall(r'\X', char) ['Å'] >>> len(regex.findall(r'\X', char)) 1