What is the easiest way to count the newlines in an ASCII file?

Question

Which is the fastest way to get the lines of an ASCII file?

Answer 1

Here's a solution based on fgetc() which will work for lines of any length and doesn't require you to allocate a buffer.

#include 

int main()
{
    FILE                *fp = stdin;    /* or use fopen to open a file */
    int                 c;              /* Nb. int (not char) for the EOF */
    unsigned long       newline_count = 0;

        /* count the newline characters */
    while ( (c=fgetc(fp)) != EOF ) {
        if ( c == '\n' )
            newline_count++;
    }

    printf("%lu newline characters\n", newline_count);
    return 0;
}