Laura asked: “How to get words count of your post?”

Laura asked: “How to get words count of your post?”

One of our readers, Laura, asked in the forum how to get and display the word count of a post. In fact, there is a plugin to do that, but I never heard about a code snippet. So here is a recipe to fit Laura’s needs.

The first thing to do is to create the function. Paste the following code on your functions.php file:

 function count_words($str){
     $words = 0;
     $str = eregi_replace(" +", " ", $str);
     $array = explode(" ", $str);
     for($i=0;$i < count($array);$i++)
 	 {
         if (eregi("[0-9A-Za-zÀ-ÖØ-öø-ÿ]", $array[$i]))
             $words++;
     }
     return $words;
 }

Then open your single.php file and paste the following code:

Word count: <?php echo count_words($post->post_content); ?>

And word count will be displayed

18 Responses

Si Jobling

Jan 26 2009 12:33

Wouldn’t it be more resourceful to use a built in PHP function such as substr_count() to count the number of words in a string?

Using your above logic, you could simplify your function to something like:

function count_words($str){ $str = eregi_replace(' +', ' ', $str); $words = substr_count(' ', $str) + 1; return $words; }

Laura

Jan 26 2009 13:29

Thanks for answering my request!

However, the first one didn’t work for me, and Si’s seemed to just return ’1′ rather than the ’499′ words I know is in the post?!

Would either of these that are in my functions.php affect this?

function string_limit_words($string, $word_limit)
{
$words = explode(‘ ‘, $string, ($word_limit + 1));
if(count($words) > $word_limit)
array_pop($words);
return implode(‘ ‘, $words);
}
function get_custom_field($key, $echo = FALSE) {
global $post;
$custom_field = get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true);
if ($echo == FALSE) return $custom_field;
echo $custom_field;
}