Returns the total number of characters remaining in the input stream. The count includes any line separator characters, if these are defined for the stream. For persistent streams the count is the count of characters from the current read position. (See Chapter 14, Input and Output Streams for a discussion of Rexx input and output.) The total number of characters remaining cannot be determined for some streams (for example, STDIN or Windows/Unix-like system devices). For these streams, the chars method returns 1 to indicate that data is present, or 0 if no data is present.