Counting words in the last line of a file

[Drone4four]

How do I count how many words there are in the last line of a file?

Here are the contents of the text file:

Welcome to your First Exam Recruit.
Only the best recruits can become agents.
Do you have what it takes?
We will test your knowledge with this field readiness exam.
It should be pretty simple, since you only know the basics so far.
Let's get started.
Best of luck recruit.

Here is the script I wrote including annotations explaining my understanding what what is going on, line by line:

with open('field.txt') as field_variable: # Opening the file as a variable
    field_variable = field_variable.readlines() # Reading the file
    list(field_variable) # Turning file contents into a list
    for i in field_variable: # Splitting each line in the list
        i.split()
    last = field_variable[-1] # Assigning the last line from the bottom by reverse slicing to a variable called, last
    for n in last: # Loop through last line
        num_chars = last.split(n) # Split last variable, assign to new variable, num_chars
        result = last.count(num_chars) # Now count number of list items
        print(result)     # Print final_chars

According to my interpreter, the problem is at line 9:

python---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-27-082decdb195e> in <module>
      7     for n in last: # Loop through last line:
      8         num_chars = last.split(n) # Split last variable, assign to new variable, num_chars
----> 9         final_chars = last.count(num_chars) # Now count number of list items
     10         print(final_chars)     # Print final_chars

TypeError: must be str, not list

Apparently Python is expecting “a string, not a list”.

There are three variables in operation at line 9: result, last and num_chars.

result is being assigned as the final integer (and end result or destination of this script - - an integer)
last contains the string of the last line of the text file, distinguished at line 6
num_chars is the integer count of the number of characters in the last line

Why is the number of characters from the last line not printing?

For my personal future reference, I’m working on Jose Portilla’s public GitHub repo for his open course on Udemy at this specific module: Python-Narrative-Journey/02-Field-Readiness-Exam-1/01-Field-Readiness-Exam-One.ipynb