Re: Checking character count

David Dorward wrote:

>>Does anyone know whether it is possible to check for the number of 
>>characters in a block of text?
>
> It is. How you do that rather depends on the programming language you
> are working in.
> 
> Simple Perl example: 
> 
>   perl -e "print scalar split '', 'The quick brown fox'";
>
And similarly, one can do an approximate word count by counting white space:

perl -e "print scalar split /\s/, 'The quick brown fox'";

I started writing a CGI programme to count words, mean word length, "Top
10" used words, etc.  The user just pastes text into a form.  I might be
persuaded to resurrect this and run it on one of my sites if anyone
thinks it would be worthwhile.  Saves having to have specific software
running on a machine.

On a similar subject - would anyone care to nominate any algorithms for
automatic (approximate) testing of readability, like Flesh-Kincaid, etc?

Cheers

M

-- 
Matthew Smith
South Australia
http://www.kbc.net.au