rmdcount: Word, character and non-whitespace characters count

In rmdwc: Count Words and Characters in R Markdown and Jupyter Notebooks

Word, character and non-whitespace characters count

Description

rmdcount counts lines, words, bytes, characters and non-whitespace characters in R Markdown files excluding code chunks. txtcount counts lines, words, bytes, characters and non-whitespace characters in plain text files.
Note that the counts may differ a bit from unix wc and Libre Office because it depends on the definition of a line, a word and a character.

Usage

rmdcount(
  files = NULL,
  space = "[[:space:]]",
  word = "[[:space:]]+",
  line = "\n",
  exclude = "```\\{.*?```"
)

txtcount(
  files = NULL,
  space = "[[:space:]]",
  word = "[[:space:]]+",
  line = "\n"
)

Arguments

files	character: file name(s)
space	character: pattern to split a text at spaces (default: '[[:space:]]')
word	character: pattern to split a text at word boundaries (default: '[[:space:]]+')
line	character: pattern to split lines (default: '\n')
exclude	character: pattern to exclude text parts, e.g. code chunks (default: '```\\{.*?```')

Details

We define:

Line

the number of lines. It differs from unix wc -l since wc counts the number of newlines.

Word

it is considered to be a character or characters delimited by white space. However, a "word" is in general a fuzzy concept, for example is "3.141593" a word? Therefore different programs may count differently, for more details see the discussion to the Libreoffice bug Word count gives wrong results - Another Example Comment 5.

The following approach is used to detect lines, words, characters and non-whitespace characters.

lines

strsplit(rmd, line)[[1]] with line='\n'

bytes

charToRaw(rmd)

words

strsplit(rmd, word)[[1]] with word='[[:space:]]+'

characters

strsplit(rmd, '')[[1]]

non-whitespace characters

strsplit(gsub(space, '', rmd), '')[[1]] with space='[[:space:]]'

If txtcount is used then code chunks are deleted with gsub('```\\{.*?```', '', rmd) before counting.

Value

a data frame with following elements

file

basename of file

lines

number of lines

words

number of words

bytes

number of bytes

chars

number of characters

nonws

number of non-whitespace characters

path

path of file

Examples

# count excluding code chunks
files <- system.file('rmarkdown/rstudio_pdf.Rmd', package="rmdwc")
rmdcount(files)
# count including code chunks
txtcount(files) # or rmdcount(files, exclude='')
# count for a set of R Markdown docs
files <- list.files(path=system.file('rmarkdown', package="rmdwc"), 
                    pattern="*.Rmd", full.names=TRUE)
rmdcount(files)
# use of rmdcount() in a R Markdown document 
if (interactive()) {
  files <- system.file('rmarkdown/rstudio_pdf.Rmd', package="rmdwc")
  file.edit(files) # SAVE(!) the file and knit it 
}
# count including code chunks
files <- system.file('rmarkdown/rstudio_pdf.Rmd', package="rmdwc")
txtcount(files)

rmdwc documentation built on June 8, 2025, 10:44 a.m.