Count Characters Words Lines | Dataford Interview Questions

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Problem

Yugabyte tooling may need lightweight statistics for text returned by command-line diagnostics. Given a string of text, count its characters, words, and lines in a single pass.

A character is every Unicode code point in the input, including spaces, tabs, and newline characters. A word is a maximal consecutive sequence of non-whitespace characters. Whitespace is determined by Python's str.isspace() behavior. Lines are separated by the newline character . An empty string contains zero lines; otherwise, its line count is one plus the number of characters.

Formal Specification

Implement count_text_stats(text), where text is a Python string. Return a dictionary with exactly these keys:

characters: total number of characters
words: number of whitespace-delimited words
lines: number of lines

Constraints

0 <= len(text) <= 10^6
Characters may include spaces, tabs, Unicode whitespace, and newline characters
A word is a maximal run of non-whitespace characters
Only the newline character \n separates lines
Do not use regular expressions or split the entire string into a list

Function Signature

def count_text_stats(text):