On 2015-02-01, at 22:06, Jörg Weger <joerg73....@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Is the character count “wc --char <textfile>” returns with or without
> blank spaces? (Which is important for me.) “man wc” doesn’t talk about that.
>
> I had hoped there was a better way than to edit the result of
> “pdftotext” in my text editor or in libreoffice writer (deleting
> unnecessary carriage returns and spaces by searching for regular
> expressions) which are able to do the count I need. In fact I had hoped
> that ConTeXt was able to count the characters and spaces it renders to
> PDF (is that theoretically possible?) …
I am pretty sure that you can make sed filter out blank characters. So
then you can just chain pdftotext, sed and wc.
OTOH, here's a relevant question (and a simple answer) on SO. (It seems
to count newlines, though.)
JFF, I've just coded this in Emacs Lisp:
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
;; Count non-blank characters in a buffer
(defun how-many-visible-chars ()
"Count visible (i.e., other than spaces, tabs and newlines)
characters in the buffer."
(interactive)
(let ((count 0))
(save-excursion
(goto-char (point-min))
(while (not (eobp))
(unless (looking-at-p "[ \t\n]")
(setq count (1+ count)))
(forward-char)))
(message "%d visible characters" count)))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
It's terribly unoptimized, but I ran it on a 300+ kB file on my low-end
netbook and it ran in something like 2 seconds, so it's not that bad in
practice. Also, it's not well-coded: it should e.g. return the number
instead of displaying the message when called non-interactively, it
might take active region into account etc. - but as a proof-of-concept,
it works surprisingly well (i.e., fast).
> Greetings Jörg
Best,
--
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the
Wiki!
maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________
