Counting backwards

I thought I would start add a blog to our lab website. The plan is to update maybe once a week with content that is too long for twitter but doesn’t fit in the categories on the lab website. I’m thinking extra analysis, paper commentaries, outreach activities etc. Let’s see how it goes.

First up: how do you count the number of words or characters in a text file?

Microsoft Word has a nice feature for doing this, but poor old TextEdit does not. Fortunately, AppleScript can come to the rescue! I found a script on the web to count the number of words in a TextEdit file and modified it slightly to give the number of characters as well.

Why would you want to do this? When editing fields on a web form (particularly grant application forms) it’s not practical to do this in the browser and these fields often have strict limits on words and characters.

Here is the code:

tell application "TextEdit"
	set wc to count words of document 1
	set cc to count characters of document 1
	if wc is equal to 1 then
		set txt to " word, "
	else
		set txt to " words, "
	end if
	if cc is equal to 1 then
		set txtc to " character."
	else
		set txtc to " characters."
	end if

	set result to "This text comprises " & (wc as string) & txt & (cc as string) & txtc
	display dialog result with title "WordStats" buttons {"OK"} default button "OK"
end tell

If you are new to this: open AppleScript Editor. New file. Paste in the code above. Click Compile. It should look something like this:

Now Save it to your Scripts folder in home/Library. Call it something sensible e.g. TextEditCounter. Now, in AppleScript Editor. Click Preferences and check the box ‘Show script menu in menu bar’. This shows the AppleScript icon in your menu bar and if you click there, you should see your script there waiting for you to use it.

This blog title is taken from Counting Backwards – Throwing Muses from their LP The Real Ramona.