{"id":404,"date":"2009-05-05T17:28:32","date_gmt":"2009-05-05T22:28:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/?p=404"},"modified":"2023-12-20T16:25:20","modified_gmt":"2023-12-20T21:25:20","slug":"for-my-next-trick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/2009\/05\/05\/for-my-next-trick\/","title":{"rendered":"For my next trick…"},"content":{"rendered":"

It didn’t take long for another Firefox extension idea to come along.<\/p>\n

Prof. Greg Wilson recently sent me an email, saying the following:<\/p>\n

I’d like a Firefox plugin that does ‘wc’, i.e., counts characters, words, and lines on the current web page, and displays the results in the status bar.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cool, I thought.\u00a0 No problem.\u00a0 That doesn’t sound too hard.<\/p>\n

But I’ve been mulling and chewing this around in my head, and it’s actually a harder problem than it first sounds.<\/p>\n

“wc<\/a>“, short for word-count, is a small, simple, yet extraordinarily useful Unix utility that reads in some file, and spits out the number of words, characters, and lines for that file.<\/p>\n

So what’s the problem?\u00a0 What’s so hard about coding something like this for web pages?<\/p>\n

Well, for starters, users of this proposed extension are probably only interested in the visible, readable text on a web page.\u00a0 That means filtering out all of the HTML tags, all of the JavaScript, etc.\u00a0 Also, many modern web pages make use of IFRAME’s, hidden DIV’s, etc.\u00a0 Not to mention, most browsers do automatic word-wrapping, which could throw off the “line” counting.\u00a0 How should I treat these cases?<\/p>\n

I certainly don’t think this is an impossible task, just harder than it first sounded.<\/p>\n

So here’s what I’m going to do:<\/p>\n

First, I’m going to take care of the base case.\u00a0 I’m going to take care of the case where users are viewing a page of all text, with almost zero HTML.<\/p>\n

My test page will be an “etext” copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (first folio)<\/a>, hosted by Project Gutenberg.<\/p>\n

According to OpenOffice Writer, this text has 32230 words, 173543 characters, and 4257 lines.<\/p>\n

So that’s my target.\u00a0 I’m going to create an extension that sits as a button on the status bar.\u00a0 When the button is clicked, an alert will pop up with the statistics.\u00a0 If all goes well, the numbers will match.<\/p>\n

Sure, it’s not the most elegant interface, but it’ll do for now.<\/p>\n

I’ll post more as it comes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It didn’t take long for another Firefox extension idea to come along. Prof. Greg Wilson recently sent me an email, saying the following: I’d like a Firefox plugin that does ‘wc’, i.e., counts characters, words, and lines on the current web page, and displays the results in the status bar. Cool, I thought.\u00a0 No problem.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,220,44,68,79],"tags":[213,125,35,222],"class_list":["post-404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-science","category-firefox-extensions","category-internet","category-javascript","category-technology","tag-extension","tag-firefox","tag-mozilla","tag-wc"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prmTy-6w","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=404"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3248,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404\/revisions\/3248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}