[Feature Request] How many characters excluding whitespaces about better-word-count HOT 3 OPEN

Will be adding more metrics over time. This included thank you for your suggestion.

from better-word-count.

+1 to whitespace-filtering - spaces, newlines, tabs, all of it. I have a couple of projects to hand in which actually have a minimum character count which is excluding whitespace, citations, references, indices and titles, and the current solution is to copy the manuscripts, strip them of spaces and count that in a manual file - which of course is kind of a terrible solution.

from better-word-count.

It looks like I forgot to make that setting do anything.
lukeleppan, in his comment in #61

That was what made me confused as well when I was going through it for modding purposes.

Short question. As I see it, the # of characters/words to be displayed in status bar are counted by getCharacterCount() & getWordCount(), correct?

So the quick'n'dirty, but should-be-working solution for f.e. excluding whitespace would be modding the getCharacterCount() - function:

function getCharacterCount(text,settings) {
    // ~Gw: modifications to this function and its calls to allow for easy exclusion via regex. - 27.01.2023 -
    var textcleaned = ""
    var initiallength = 0
    var cleanedlength = 0
    initiallength = text.length
    textcleaned = text
    if (typeof settings==="object") {
        var dontcountWhitespace = settings.dontcountWhitespace
        var dontcountHTMLComments = settings.dontcountHTMLComments
    }
    else {
        var dontcountWhitespace = settings // ~Gw: merely here because I have not figured out how to feed the settings to calcTotalCharacters() to be fed in here yet.
    }
    
    if (dontcountWhitespace) {
        if (textcleaned.match(/\s+/g)){
            textcleaned = textcleaned.replace(/\s+/g, '') // ~Gw:  replace whitespace
        }
    }
    
    if (dontcountHTMLComments) {
        if (textcleaned.match(/(?=<!--)([\s\S]*?)-->/g)){
            textcleaned = textcleaned.replace(/(?=<!--)([\s\S]*?)-->/g, '') // ~Gw:  replace HTML comments
        }
    }



    cleanedlength = textcleaned.length
    return cleanedlength
}

I made it expandable for now in case I want to add more settings to exclude. What I haven't figured out yet is where/how calcTotalCharacters() fetches the plugin settings - but I am also not using that feature at all so far, so for now that case just doesn't work.
Then all that needs to be done is add the respective variable to data.json, modify the class BetterWordCountSettingsTab to contain a setting for this and be done (I think).

Again, just theorising, reading through the code and looking up a few things online - I don't write in JS at all, so take it with a grain of salt - but this should work.

Further Todo's I'm thinking about would be to add an option to count both, because sometimes you actually want both simultaneously. Maybe make it its own count, or change charactercount into an array and refer to the index of / depending on the respective settings?

Edit: forgot global flags in needle :P
Edit2: slightly reworked function for better expandability.

from better-word-count.