Word Count and Character Count Tools

In the phrase “I do” there are 2 words and 4 characters (the space counts). If you can read, you know what a word is. But do you know what a character is–it’s anything, including spaces, ENTERs / line breaks, letters, and punctuation. For example, an ellipsis  “…” has 0 words and 3 characters.

Word counts typically come into play when writing an essay, contest or scholarship entry, or when writing for a newspaper column or magazine article. However, when counting words, issues like domain names (TourKick.com) arise. Is that 2 words separated by the punctuation of a period, or is it one word? To humans it’s one word, but computers need to told how to interpret it. Because humans control computers (most of the time ;), there is room for interpretation and programming errors, unlike in character counting.

Character counts often come into play on the Internet: MLS / property descriptions, Facebook comment length, and more. Have you heard of Twitter? It’s kind of what that service is designed around…

In my opinion, character counts are more straight-forward, reliable, and, thus, useful. With character counting, computers only need to count characters (as opposed to learning to read words)

Below is some example text that contains 47 (or 48, or 50) words and 279 characters.

To skip to the WINNER, click here, or read on and you’ll get there soon…

Example Text Entry

Right now, I am reading an excellent blog post from TourKick.com. How many words do you count? How many characters do you count? What’s a character? Stop trying to be human and let the computer do it for you–be lazy–I mean “efficient”… and accurate–THAT’s truly being human!

Notes / Things to watch for:

• Characters: “minus sign / hyphen” (-)  is shorter than an “en dash” (—) is  shorter than an “em dash” (–)
• In the text above, “–be lazy–” includes 4 hyphens, 0 en dashes, and 0 em dashes (even if it displays differently on this web page, which it may or may not)
• 4 hyphens = 4 characters. 2 en dashes or 2 em dashes would both equal 2 characters, even though one dash is longer than the other (we’re not measuring text width–like a “w” vs an “i”)
• An ellipsis (…), a.k.a. “dot dot dot”, may be interpreted as 3 characters or 1 character, depending on how the computer interprets it. In Microsoft Word, for example, if you copy/paste the example text (where it’s 3 characters), MS Word won’t convert it to a single ellipsis character. But if you go into Word and type “…”, Word will change it to a single character (and it’ll usually look slightly different–maybe a little narrower or a little wider, depending on your font).
  • If you’re writing an MLS property description, I’d hope you don’t use ellipses often. Just beware that if you write your MLS description directly in Word, your character count may be 2 less than your MLS’ count.
• If you use Notepad++ or another advanced text editor (not Notepad or WordPad, for example) that counts characters, just beware to select all the text you want to count, instead of looking at the status bar’s “Col: _” count — because that is telling you where your cursor is. For example: “abc<cursor position>” would show your cursor in “Column: 4”. But if you selected all the text, there would only be “abc” to select and, thus, Notepad++ would correctly tell you the selection is “3”.
• Text capitalization and font type, if any, are ignored in both word count and character count.

Online Tools

This section was the main reason I wrote this blog post. I guess it grew into a little bit more, as usual, hopefully for your benefit…

The reasons to know about online character count tools:

1. Writing character-length-restricted text is a part of REALTORS’ ® daily/weekly/monthly jobs. It’s part of MLS; it’s part of Facebook posts; it’s the purpose of Twitter; it’s part of text messaging. And if you pay close attention to search engine stuff (SEO), you know that Google and other search engines have character count limits for how search engine results are displayed.
2. My MLS (Greater Tulsa Association of REALTORS ®) allows 255 characters of text in the Public Description, Directions, and REALTOR ®-Only Remarks sections–255 characters per section. However, my broker (McGraw Realtors) requires appending of the words, “Square Footage is not affirmed.” in all Public Descriptions–so that leaves me, the REALTOR ®, with only 224 characters; really 223 to add a space before this last sentence–that’s like 1-1/2 tweets.
3. Not everyone has Microsoft Word. In case you didn’t realize it, it’s not a free program.
4. Even if you have MS Word, you’re not always at the computer to type in it. And if that’s all you need it for, it might be cumbersome to wait for the program to open, paste, hope none of the text is converted (e.g. from dot-dot-dot to ellipsis), try to find the Word Count button, edit the text if it needs to be shorter or longer, etc.
5. If you’re on the go or on a computer at the office, library, or your laptop, netbook, iPad, or other device that doesn’t have Word, it’d be convenient to have a web-based character count tool. Don’t you agree? Here are some:

Links

http://www.wordcountertool.com/ – WINNER!

Results: 47 words, 279 characters

Good: It counts as you type (no need to click a “Count” button). There’s a typing speed timer, if you want to use it. You  can change text to ALL UPPER or all lower case with a click.

Bad: There’s no “undo” (not even CTRL+Z). You can’t “undo” once you change all to lower or upper case either.

http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/charcount.shtml

Results: 279 characters

Good: You can embed the character count form on your own website

Bad: It’s not pretty (although it’s not ugly either–just not too eye-catching, which might be their intent)

http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/character-counter.htm

Results: 279 characters

Good: There are some SEO tips below the text box.

Bad: A pop-up was displayed before I could see the webpage.

http://www.lettercount.com/

Results: 279 characters

Good: Information about Twitter, SMS, Google AdSense, and other tips are displayed below the text box form.

Bad: The webpage has LOTS of text all over the page. The helpful tips (Good) are easy to miss if you’re not looking for them.

http://wordcounttool.info/character-count-tool/

Results: 47 words, 279 characters

Good: clean webpage design

Bad: 2 separate boxes–1 for word count, 1 for character count–could get you out-of-sync if you want to count both words and characters

http://www.wordcounttool.com/

Results: 48 words

Good: It tells you what it includes and excludes right below the box.

Bad: It only counts words, not characters.

Offline / Desktop Tools

Notepad++ (free) or similar (free and paid software programs exist)

Results: 47 words, 233  characters (without spaces)  279 characters (with spaces)

Good: Can do lots of stuff like remove blank lines, syntax highlighting for programming languages, compare/diff two files to see differences, advanced search and replace, and much more.

Bad: Can do lots of stuff. ;) — To get to the word and character count, you have to select the text, click “TextFX”, click “TextFX Tools”, and then click “Word Count”.

FYI: A4AppHack.com has some great how-to videos for Notepad++.

Microsoft Word (not free; part of Microsoft Office)

Results: 50 words, 233 characters (no spaces), 279 characters (with spaces)

Open Office (a free Microsoft Office Suite alternative)

Results: I didn’t test it.

Feedback

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