Arve Bersvendsen

Word count for HTML documents

Ok, I’ll have to be careful, so this site doesn’t become a Komodo-only fansite, but I still feel the need to praise the exceptional value of this editor.

I’m currently busy preparing a paper. The thing is, however, that I have to produce an approximate number of words in this paper. Most people would’ve just say “use wc”. Normally, this is a good suggestion, but as the paper I’m writing is HTML, WC isn’t neccesarily accurate. It ends up counting elements surrounded by whitespace as “words”. Which is, according to the tool’s design, entirely correct. It’s correct, but not correct for me, so I needed to roll my own, and this is where Komodo comes in very handy:

Since Komodo is a XUL application, it also conveniently exposes a document object, which we can reuse for this purpose. See below, for a macro that may not qualify as ‘beautiful’, but it’s still extremely handy:

komodo.assertMacroVersion(2);
if (komodo.view) { komodo.view.setFocus() };
var text = (komodo.editor.selText || komodo.editor.text).replace(/<\?.*\?>/,"").replace(/<!.*>/,"");
var doc = document.createElementNS('http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml','floble'); // implementation.createDocument('http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml',null,null)
doc.innerHTML = text;
text = doc.textContent.replace(/^\s*/,'').replace(/\s*$/,'').replace(/\s{2,}/igm," ");
textNodes = text.split(/\s+/);
alert("Wordcount: "+textNodes.length);

So, you’re wondering what more you can do? Well, mostly anything you could ever think of doing in a browser.