Word count / estimated reading time

[chylex]

Hi, I'd like to propose adding a word count (or an estimated reading time, which is typically calculated based on the word count) to the table with articles.

It would help me know at a glance whether a new article is short enough to read when I don't have a lot of time, or just generally get an idea of how long each article will take - especially if I've added a new feed that has a lot of articles I want to read. I found that 7/8 of my feeds included the whole article so the word count was accurate, 1/8 feeds only included an excerpt.

I edited my installation to support this. It's not quite PR-able at the moment, but if there's interest I could finish it up. This is an example of how it looks right now:

[Grotax]

Hi, I personally don't need such a counter but I often see it on blogs and so on, so I guess some people find it useful.

PRs are generally welcome, did you implement this in the front-end with js only?

And how is the performance impact, noticeable changes?

[chylex]

It's implemented in the back-end, I don't like delegating work to browsers. It's just str_word_count. I haven't noticed any performance impact, but imo there's bigger fish to fry - in my version, I limited the length of the intro field because News happily sends the contents of 170k word blog posts into a field that seems to be only displayed in a single line summary, so for blogs like danluu.com this small change saved 4.5 MB of data and who knows long on the browser's side. Anyway, that's an unrelated change, but seems like an easy performance win.

About reliability across feeds, I already addressed that but I'd be happy to make the word count optional in the Settings on the bottom, for people who don't want it or who have mostly excerpt-only feeds where it's not useful. I still haven't decided if I want a word count or estimated reading time (or both, with one in the alt text so it doesn't take too much space - but maybe it's not easily discoverable).

[SMillerDev]

If it's implemented in the backend I doubt there would be much performance loss but I'd want it to be optional in the frontend. Either way, seems like a good thing to discuss in a pull request.

[chylex]

Sounds good, I'll try to get it done during next week. Here's my plan, let me know if it sounds ok:

• add word count into the json
• add table column with the word count to the right of date, as it is on the screenshot
  • only visible if "Show word count" is enabled in Settings
  • format the number according to locale (i.e. thousands separators)
  • add alt text that shows the estimated reading time in minutes (and hours if applicable)
    • calculated from an est. average of 225 wpm (most sources I found seem to estimate 200-250 wpm)
    • rounded up to nearest minute

[SMillerDev]

Sounds good, although I'd prefer if frontend and backend were two different PRs.

[chylex]

My initial approach with str_word_count turned out to be problematic, it does not handle UTF-8 at all. Ended up with a different solution that's more reliable, especially for non-English text:

private static function countWords(string $text): int
{
  $text = preg_replace('/[\pP\pM]/u', '', $text); // strip punctuation (P) and combination marks (M)
  $text = preg_replace('/[^\pL\pN]+/u', ' ', $text); // convert every sequence of non-letters (L) and non-numbers (N) to a space
  return 1 + substr_count($text, ' ');
}