[Viv]

I'm not looking to make more work for Robbie. Really and honestly. But I dig this feature I've seen elsewhere: in the story summary area, when you're trying to figure out whether you wanna invest the time in reading a piece, some sites give the total word count for the story.

Being a programming noob in the worst possible way, I have no idea what implementing a feature like this would entail. But I thought I'd mention it, 'cause I'm irritating like that.

[Robbie]

!?

Actually, this would be possible. Each time you lodge a story, I split it into words and count the words for the search index.

I'll just need to modify the code and the database it and ad it all up (and work out where to display it)

Leave it with me - with no promises.

[Robbie]

As do so politely put, "Who else could she leave it with?, so it's done. Please let me know of any problems.

Word counts are approximate - took me a long time to count them all and I ran out of marbles for some stories.

[dolarabee]

Before someone else reports it, I just noticed that the 100-word drabbles show up as 70-ish words long... Robbie says it's probably counting 'individual' words. So if you have the word 'a' twice, it only counts it once...

Is that what you meant, Viv?

do.

[Robbie]

OK fixed that.

Now, one of your drabbles is 97 words long, my dear (or 98 if you include "what's" as 2 words). I thought they should be 100 exactly



**************
But in fixing this, I noticed that the search indexes/indices will be a little stuffed for some stories. I'll need to work out which they are and fix them, unfortunately. That'll take about a week.

[Viv]

Wheee! Thanks!

Word-counters all have different ways of arriving at totals, so just becase Word says it's 100 words doesn't mean other counters will agree. I figure drabble authors have run the count by Word (or other word processor), which is sufficient, as far as I'm concerned, for qualifying as a drabble.

Thank you so much!

[NancyBrooke]

And some of mine come in a bit over ... I know MSWord, e.g. counts ellipses ( ... ) and I wondered if the word counter was counting notes before hand, like author's thanks etc. I think there's no way we should expect this to be perfect. None of us do things exactly the same way.

[Robbie]

I split by any character that is not a-z, A-Z, 0-9, - (hyphen) or ' (apostrophe). I then strip out anything that is zero letters (so comma followed by space will be removed).

Oh, I also convert all fancy letters (e.g.é, ç into e and c etc first).

[Sulriel]

excellent addition. thank you!

[Viv]