Tally

Tally is a command-line tool written in Go that provides word, line, and byte counting functionality for files. It serves as an alternative to the traditional UNIX tool wc, with added support for exporting results in JSON.

Features

• Count words, lines, and bytes in a file.
• Export count results in plain text or JSON.
• Simple and efficient command-line interface.

Usage

tally [OPTIONS] FILE

Options:
  -f string
        Output format: text, json (default "text")

Examples:
  # Count words, lines, and bytes in a file (default output format is text)
  tally filename.txt

  # Count words, lines, and bytes in a file and export results in JSON format
  tally -f json filename.txt

Development

Prerequisites

• Go 1.16 or newer

Building from Source

git clone https://github.com/arnaudmorisset/tally.git
cd tally
go build

Running Tests

go test ./...

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to open issues for feature requests, bug fixes, or general feedback.

License

This project is licensed under the Beerware License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Note

This project is primarily educational and intended for learning purposes. While Tally can be used for basic file counting tasks, it is not intended to replace wc for real-world usage scenarios. For production environments, wc or similar established tools are recommended.

In a real world scenario, you will probably use something along the lines of:

#!/bin/bash

# Run wc -wl command and capture its output
wc_output=$(wc -wlc "$1")

# Extract word count, line count, and byte count using awk
words=$(echo "$wc_output" | awk '{print $1}')
lines=$(echo "$wc_output" | awk '{print $2}')
bytes=$(echo "$wc_output" | awk '{print $3}')

# Format the counts as JSON
json_output="{\"words\": $words, \"lines\": $lines, \"bytes\": $bytes}"

# Print the JSON output
echo "$json_output"