Web word count

Ms Hollands · Mar 3, 2009

Is there any way I can calculate how many words are published on a website, not including all the HTML tagging etc.? I've been offered some proofing work on a very large website, but it's massive and I fear it will take some time to figure out.

So far, the best method I can think of is to copy and paste the text into one big MS Word document and do a word count on it, but is there a faster way? There are a ridiculous number of pages going on...

Priene · Mar 3, 2009

I would almost certainly write a program to do this, as I couldn't find much promising freeware that already has this function.

You could copy each web page into word and then use wildcard replace to get rid of anything in a tag: all strings starting with '<' and ending with '>'. Other than that, I'm having difficulty thinking of an easy solution.

Ms Hollands · Mar 3, 2009

Such software would indeed be handy.

I copied and pasted the output page so there weren't even any HTML tags to worry about. 18,000-odd words!

felipe · Mar 6, 2009

There are a number of tools that use a javascript to count the words, but they would work the same way as a Word. You would still have to copy/paste everything.
If the text is long, it will take a while.
When you say website, you mean the entire website?
If this is the case, it really is a hard work, because most modern websites store most of their information on a database, you would have to generate each page, download it and then count it.
An application for that, sure would be a handy one.

Ms Hollands · Mar 8, 2009

It's a website based on php, so I loaded each page, copied and pasted into MS Word, and word counted from that.

It only took about 10 minutes in the end as I'm fast with my keyboard shortcuts :O)

Web word count

Ms Hollands

Cow lover

Priene

Out to lunch

Ms Hollands

Cow lover

felipe

Ms Hollands

Cow lover