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An Accurate Word Count of a Basic Text Document
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| Submitted on: |
1/22/2004 4:42:20 PM |
| By: |
Bill Platt
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| Level: |
Beginner |
| User Rating: |
By 1 Users |
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5.0 (all versions) |
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In my case, I needed to count the number of words in every article on my website. However you use it, this code will permit you to send a text string to a subroutine which will return to you the precise number of words in your string.
The text fed to the subroutine can be sent with special characters including line feeds, and the subroutine will still return the precise number of words in the string.
The string's Word Count is placed into the variable ($word_count) which can then be used in your own scripts.
Although not required, a link to thePhantomWriters.com is requested when this code is used.
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# Use this code in your own script pointing to
# the subroutine Count_Words:
Count_Words("$article_text");
# And here is the actual subroutine:
sub Count_Words($working_text)
{
my $word_calc = $_[0];
$word_calc =~ s/\n/ /g;
$word_calc =~ s/ / /g;
# Must contain two spaces between first two slashes
$word_calc =~ s/ / /g; # Must contain two spaces
$word_calc =~ s/ /X/g;
$word_calc =~ s/[^a-zA-Z0-9_\.]//g;
$word_calc =~ s/X/ /g;
$word_calc =~ s/ / /g; # Must contain two spaces
$word_calc =~ s/ / /g; # Must contain two spaces
@word_cnt = split(/ /, $word_calc);
$word_count = @word_cnt;
}
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Other User Comments
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 1/25/2004 1:30:37 AM:
i see a problem in the code in these lines,
$word_calc =~ s/ /X/g;
$word_calc =~ s/[^a-zA-Z0-9_\.]//g;
$word_calc =~ s/X/ /g;
what if a word has X in it ?
also, what about other punctuations like , : ; etc..
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1/25/2004 3:11:53 AM: Bill Platt
I used the "X" because it is rarely used in English words. While it is possible that the use of an "X" may cause a word to be split incorrectly into two words, the chance of that is slim since we are using the capital "X" rather than the little "x". By my understanding the two are treated separately in perl.
The special characters you speak of can be trimmed since they do not affect the actual word count.
The reason I convert the spaces to capital X's and then trim the special characters out, before switching the capital X back to a space is because I had to remove the extra spaces and carriage returns from the variable. Previous to the X conversions, the extra spaces at the end of a line or lack thereof, and the \n skewed the count results to an incorrect number. I had to convert the input to a string with only "one" space between each word in order to get an accurate count.
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1/28/2004 11:29:22 AM:
Rather than two repetative lines like this one:
$word_calc =~ s/ / /g;
# Must contain two spaces between first two slashes
You could use:
$word_calc =~ s/ +/ /g;
to replace one or more spaces with a single space.
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1/31/2004 12:06:18 AM: Aaron L. Anderson
I agree with the last poster. there is a bit of reduntant code in here, you can easily change a few regexes and better the script. You shouldn't break on X, what would be the point? It's a normal a-zA-Z character, you shouldn't filter ANY of these out if you want an accurate count.
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8/17/2004 3:01:53 PM:
correct me if i am wrong but couldn't you just "split" it into an array and then just get the count of the array....instead of going through all that....?
@whatever = split(/[ .,;:\'\"\\\/\`\~\!\@\#\$\%\^\&\*\(\)\_\-\+\+\[\]\{\}\?]+/,$working_text);
$word_count = @whatever;
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8/17/2004 3:05:28 PM:
That last post should read @whatever = split(/[\s.,;:\'\"\\\/\`\~\!\@\#\$\%\^\&\*\(\)\_\- \+\+\[\]\{\}\?]+/,$working_text); $word _count = @whatever;
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8/17/2004 3:08:15 PM: Bill Platt
I am sure that all of the suggestions so far offered are correct. I am still learning the perl language. It worked for me and I was happy. Keep bringing the suggestions so that I can learn more about how to do this best.
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8/17/2004 7:33:19 PM:
Paraphrase of original textual comment: The most powerful part of good languages is the fact that you have versatility to optimize your programs for performance. Larger programs go faster because the code is written straight out. Smaller programs try to cram everything into one line causing the processor to work extra hard, because it has to go here and do this and during that go here and do this. Small functional programs tend to do this more. Large scale projects generally go for faster code.
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9/30/2005 7:11:05 PM: Matthew van Eerde
Here's a one-liner:
$word_count = ($working_text =~ s/\b(\w)/$1/);
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9/30/2005 7:11:39 PM: Matthew van Eerde
Er, should be
$word_count = ($working_text =~ s/\b(\w)/$1/g);
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11/11/2006 9:03:36 AM: angel
hello im just perl beginner. i need help. i dont know on what codes to type on how to count the number of punctuation characters used within a paragraph.
at the same i also dont know on what codes to type on how to count, lines, words and characters.
can anybody pls help me i would really appreciate it plsssssssss
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