Get word count in text and/or textedit?
This seems super basic, but I can't find anything in the Help or Reference files, and I have searched the forums to no avail...
Is it possible to get the word count (the total number of words) in either the [text] or [textedit] objects? Ideally, I would get this straight from textedit, but I don't see a way.
Surely I am missing something. Any help would be appreciated!
Maybe something like this?
So simple. Thanks so much!!!
Or even simpler: [zl.len]
Oh yeah, 100% TFL. Dunno why I didn't think about zl.len!
Thanks so much!
Oh, wait: what if you have the output mode on [textedit] set to Output as one symbol? It then adds quotes and only counts "1"... I assume I need to convert back from symbol to list, which [fromsymbol] does, but then it will treat each letter as a list item, right?
Update: sorry, just realized this is not the problem I thought it might be. [fromsymbol] seems to do the job for getting the word count from [textedit].
But I still can't figure out how to get it from [text].
Background: I am using the text object to read preexisting text files and to load them into [textedit].
To get everything added, including text filled with line breaks, I am doing the following:
Try this
It looks like my troubles are coming from the fact that there are quotation marks in the txt files. Whatever is inside gets counted fine when the text first dumps into textedit, but it reads quoted material as a single symbol when I start editing in textedit. So I get different readings...
It's always tricky to deal with " in Max since they have a specific meaning (delimiting symbols with spaces in them).
So the proper solution to your problem will depend on what you actually want to do with these words, if you want to keep the double quotes or not, if you're fine to replace them by other quotation symbols or not...
Anyway, strictly for counting the number of words regardless of " the initial solution of 2K works fine! The text a bit of "something else" loaded from a .txt into [text] gives a length of 5 which is the desired result:
(here in the example I populate [text] with a message instead of a file so I need to escape the " by a \ so they get treated as any other symbol)