About

Given the proliferation of Markdown and the use of Jekyll as a blogging platform, the builtin wc utility came up short. Even for plain-text prose, wc can leave much to be desired. To that end, prose-wc will calculate proper word, paragraph, and character counts for a given plaintext, or markdown file or stream through STDIN.

Also, Madison wanted to learn how to package for PyPI.

Installing

pip install prose-wc

Running

usage: prose-wc [-h] [-S] [-u] [-f [{yaml,json,default}]] [-i [INDENT]] file

Compute Jekyl- and prose-aware wordcounts

positional arguments:
  file                  file to count (or - for STDIN)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -S, --split-hyphens   split hyphenated words rather than counting them as
                        one word ("non-trivial" counts as two words rather
                        than one)
  -u, --update          update the jekyll file in place with the counts. Does
                        nothing if the file is not a Jekyll markdown file.
                        Implies format=yaml, invalid with input from STDIN and
                        non-Jekyll files.
  -f [{yaml,json,default}], --format [{yaml,json,default}]
                        output format.
  -i [INDENT], --indent [INDENT]
                        indentation depth (default: 4).

Accepted filetypes: plaintext, markdown, markdown (Jekyll)

Running prose-wc against a file will generate a series of counts that might be of use. You can get these counts in a simple, tab-separated format, JSON, or YAML. If you’re working with a Jekyll markdown file, you can also choose to have this data embedded in the frontmatter as YAML.

Other filetypes

You can use pandoc to convert your file and pipe it into prose-wc:

pandoc -f latex -t plain my_great_story.tex | prose-wc -

In a Jekyll site

You can add wordcount information to your site by running prose-wc -u <file>, which will update the Jekyll frontmatter to include the results in YAML format. This data can then be included on the page in some place handy such as at the top of a post in _layouts/post.html with:

{% if page.counts %}
    <p class="text-muted small">
        {{ page.counts.paragraphs }} {% if page.counts.paragraphs == 1 %}paragraph{% else %}paragraphs{% endif %} &bullet;
        {{ page.counts.words }} words
    </p>
{% endif %}

This would result in something like this.

You can add wordcounts to posts with a find command like:

find . \( -name '*.md' -or -name '*.markdown' \) -exec prose-wc -u "{}" \;

Further information

Source, issues, and further information:

GitHub

Author

Madison Scott-Clary