General ⇒ Word count display

[MinatureCookie]

Hi, sorry if this has been asked before - but everytime I try and search for information on this I get a load of information about "Count how many words in a .tex" file - whereas I want something different.

I want to, say, have something like this:

Code: Select all

\begin{wordcount}
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
\end{wordcount}
That was \wordnumber words

I've already gathered that there isn't a pre-set way to do this, so I'm happy to write my own solution... But I'm really struggling to see how. I'm worried it is just generally impossible since I'm trying something inherently imperative, and LaTeX is really lexical in nature... But there must be some way to make a package from some C++ or Perl or... Something?

Any help on this would be massively appreciated! Even if it is just a curt "No, completely impossible"

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi,

welcome to the board!

With XeLaTeX, you could use the xesearch package for this:

Code: Select all

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xesearch}
\newcounter{words}
\newenvironment{wordcount}{%
  \setcounter{words}{0}
  \SearchList!{wordcount}{\stepcounter{words}}
    {a?,b?,c?,d?,e?,f?,g?,h?,i?,j?,k?,l?,m?,
    n?,o?,p?,q?,r?,s?,t?,u?,v?,w?,x?,y?,z?}
  \UndoBoundary{'}
  \SearchOrder{p;}}{%
  \StopSearching}
\begin{document}
\begin{wordcount}
  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
\end{wordcount}

That was \arabic{words} words.
\end{document}

wordcount.png (8.5 KiB) Viewed 9679 times

Stefan

[MinatureCookie]

Thanks for the welcome

And ah, that's so great! Would you mind just explaining to me a few bits of the code though? I can't find much about this on Google. Namely:

Code: Select all

\SearchList!{wordcount}{\stepcounter{words}}
    {a?,b?,c?,d?,e?,f?,g?,h?,i?,j?,k?,l?,m?,
    n?,o?,p?,q?,r?,s?,t?,u?,v?,w?,x?,y?,z?}

Is this just searching for letters, and if it doesn't find one, increment 'words'? Is there any way to get it to just do this for the space character instead? Seeing as my text could include grammar/numbers.

Code: Select all

\UndoBoundary{'}
\SearchOrder{p;}

What are these two things doing?

Also - you put one too many }'s at

Code: Select all

SearchOrder{p;}}{

But thanks so much - I'm still a little new to LaTeX, I would never have found out about this in time

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Those braces are necessary: we defined an environment, so we need arguments for begin code and end code, each in braces.

For explanation regarding xesearch and word count, have a look at the xesearch documentation, it's explained in 7.2. Word count. Click the link to it in my previous post, or type at the command prompt

Code: Select all

texdoc xesearch

to open your local documentation.

Stefan

[MinatureCookie]

Ahh, I didn't see you'd linked that. And that's so great thanks, the documentation clears that all up.