Use the classes and methods in the java.io package to open the file.
Your friendly Java reference can tell you more.  Read each line.  Keep
count.  Look at each character and see if it's a vowel.  Keep count.

It should be beyond trivial for you to demonstrate 0.00001% effort and
1) use Google as a source of information, 2) read your friendly
textbook, and 3) try it yourself.

You didn't mention what language the text file is using and that could make
a difference.  I'm not talking about the programming language which you are
using to parse the text file, I'm talking about the language used in the
text file.

Even if the language used in the text file is always English and you _know_
that it is always English, what do you do with the letter "y"? Is it a vowel
or a consonant? When I was in primary school, they taught that the vowels
were "a, e, i, o, u and _sometimes_ y". (I don't remember anyone ever
explaining when 'y' was considered a vowel and when it was considered a
consonant so I _suspect_ that the 'y' in "happy" is considered a vowel but
the 'y' in "yard" is considered a consonant without really being remotely
SURE.)

If the language in the text file isn't guaranteed to be English, the problem
gets much harder since you presumably don't know which language it is. And
while many languages are written using the same letters that we use in
English - sometimes with accents thrown in - those letters aren't always
pronounced the same as we pronounce them. So, in some cases, a letter that
might be a vowel to us could conceivably be a consonant in the other
language. (I can't actually think of an example of 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o' or 'u'
being considered a consonant in some other language but it seems possible
that such a case could exist.) And once you get into languages that don't
use the English alphabet - like Russian or Chinese - things get even
crazier. I'm pretty sure Russian has letters that are considered vowels -
although I'm not sure which ones they are - but I'm not at all sure if
Chinese or Arabic or Hindi even has the concept of vowels and consonants.

Now, I'm probably just overcomplicating the problem far beyond the
intentions of your instructor but, if you are hoping to do a thorough job
with this program, you may want to research this point and see if the
definition of a vowel is sufficiently firm that you can apply it to any
language you find in the text file that you are parsing. This could be worth
serious brownie points if you can actually handle a multitude of languages
and recognize the vowels in them regardless of the language chosen. :-)

--
Rhino

Check this URL out:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/io/BufferedReader.html

You should be able to figure it out from here I think.

Good luck,

Mearvk