How to count the number of characters of the word that came from the first line of a text file?

Question

Below is an example of how to count the number of characters in a string:

$palavra ="coisa";
echo strlen($palavra); //retorna o número 5

However I am taking this word from a text file and the strlen it’s not working, see:

$f = fopen("palavras.txt", "r");
echo fgets($f); // Até aqui funciona: ecoa "casa".
echo strlen($f); //A primeira palavra do arquivo de texto é "casa", 
                //  mas o echo não ecoa 4.

I’ve tried to do it this way too and it didn’t work:

$f = fopen("palavras.txt", "r");
$palavra = fgets($f); 
echo strlen($palavra); // Está ecoando 6 que não corresponde aos 4 caracteres da       
                      //palavra "casa".

OBS.: currently the file contains 3 words, each one in a row. But I intend to put more words.

I started to do the form below, but still it is not returning 4 characters to home, is always returning 3 characters more than apalavra that I put in the first line in the file:

 $f = fopen("palavras.txt", "r");
 $palavra = fgets($f);
 echo strlen(trim($palavra));

ADDED ON 25/08/2014

Guys, since each word is an array of characters I was trying to print on the screen to check if it would print something more than the four letters of the word "home", I found that the word home is on:

echo $palavra[3];
echo $palavra[4];
echo $palavra[5];
echo $palavra[6];

What’s in 0, 1 and 2? I did a for printing all and the first three positions appear on the screen as lozenges with a question mark

I set both the html meta and the file when saving to utf-8 .

I’ve tried utf8_decode and nothing.

I figured if I always took out 3 characters of the result I would solve my problem I went to search and found this satckoverflow question in English: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4057742/how-to-remove-efbbbf-in-php-string

One guy does exactly this, but another also warns that discarding the GOOD is not a good idea,even because if one time the GOOD is not set I would be failing to count 3 characters of my word. I don’t want to gambiarra. I want to understand.

Look at my final code working:

//Nesse arquivo na primeira linha tenho somente a palavra "casa"
$f = fopen("palavras.txt","r");
$palavra = fgets($f);
$car= strlen(trim($palavra)) - 3;
echo $car;
//Com o código acima retorno o valor 4, sem o (-3) retorna 7.

Ma will be fine?

**SOLVED! SAVING WITHOUT THE BLESSED "GOOD"! ON THE NOTEPAD++ HAS TO GO ON

ENCODING

BECAUSE WINDOWS NOTEPAD DOESN’T HAVE THAT OPTION.**

Thank you all! The @Jader reply is very useful and I will definitely use it, but according to the question if anyone else in the forum needs this information @bfavaretto put it all.

Answer 1

The variable $f represents the file. The command fgets($f) reads the next line of the file (in your example, the first). So it makes no sense to try to measure $f, you need to measure fgets($f):

$f = fopen("palavras.txt", "r");
$linha = fgets($f);
echo strlen($linha);

As pointed out by @mgibsonbr, the return of fgets includes line breaking. In a file containing only the word "home" and formatted in Windows, this means casa\r\n, that is, the car return and the line break count and the length gives 6. You can use trim to remove these characters (it removes blanks at the beginning and end of the string, including line breaks and tabs):

echo strlen(trim($linha));

Another important detail: in UTF-8 encoding, certain characters, such as accents, will occupy more than one byte, and PHP will incorrectly measure the length in these cases. To solve, you’ll need to use the function mb_strlen:

echo mb_strlen(trim($linha));

To read all the lines, just use a loop. Putting everything together, it looks like this:

$f = fopen("palavras.txt", "r");
while($linha = fgets($f) !== false) {
    echo $linha . ' - ' . mb_strlen(trim($linha)) . '<br>';
}

---

About PHP returning 3 more characters in the first line count, everything indicates that your TXT file is with UTF-8 encoding with BOM (byte order Mask). You need to change the encoding to UTF-8 without BOM. The way to do this depends on the editor, usually stays in the save dialog itself, or in a separate option of encoding.

Answer 2

To get through all the words you need to do something like this:

$texto = file_get_contents('teste.txt');

$palavras = preg_split('/[\s\r\n\t[:punct:]]+/', $texto, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);

$tamanhos = array();
foreach($palavras as $palavra) $tamanhos[] = strlen($palavra);

for ($i = 0; $i < sizeof($palavras); $i++) {
    echo  $i . '.) "' . $palavras[$i] . '"  - ' . $tamanhos[$i] . '<br>';
}

test.txt

Casa grande é outra coisa!
Mas, custa caro para manter...

Upshot:

0.) "Casa" - 4
1.) "grande" - 6
2.) "é" - 1
3.) "outra" - 5
4.) "coisa" - 5
5.) "Mas" - 3
6.) "custa" - 5
7.) "caro" - 4
8.) "para" - 4
9.) "manter" - 6

To catch a word randomly use the rand() thus:

$r = rand(0,sizeof($palavras)-1);

echo 'Palavra aleatoria: ' . $palavras[$r] . ' - ' . $tamanhos[$r];

// Resultado:
// Palavra aleatoria: coisa - 5