Line Counter

Line counts are most useful for code, where they're a proxy for complexity and size. Total lines give a sense of overall scale; blank-line and non-blank-line breakdowns give a sense of structure (lots of blank lines means lots of section breaks; few blank lines means dense code). Longest-line length helps with style enforcement — most style guides cap line length at 80 or 120 characters for readability.

For prose, line counts matter less than word counts, but they're still useful for assessing document structure. A 1000-word document with 50 lines (averaging 20 words per line) is dense, formal prose — an academic essay or a technical report. The same word count with 200 lines (5 words per line) is a list, a poem, or a slide deck. The line-per-word ratio tells you something about the document's nature.

Line ending normalization is the most common gotcha. A file created on Windows has CRLF line endings (two characters); the same content on Linux has LF (one character). Tools that naively split on \n will count Windows files incorrectly — every line break counts as two. We normalize all variants to a single line-ending style before counting.