Re: counting the words in a TeX document

["Mojca Miklavec" <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

On 8/7/06, Hans Hagen wrote:
>
> > (I'll spare you the fun with sections for some other time,) but since
> > you reminded me that I might have some questions left, here you have
> > another one: how do I replace hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes with
> > "spaces/line breaks"?
> >        \catcode`~=13\let~=\space
> > does what I want, but none of the following works:
> >        \def\-{\space}
> >        \def-{\space}
> >        \let\-=\space
> >
> \catcode`-=\active \def-{ }

I tried that one already, but it didn't work. Now I figured out that
it was because of nesting the definitions (perhaps even some
interference with negative numbers?), not because of wrong definition
on itself.

I'm sorry.

Mojca

(But my fear is that the whole problem is too complex anyway (tables,
...) to be solved elegantly.)

\long\def\startstatistics#1\stopstatistics
	{\setbox0\vbox\bgroup  % \tracingall -)
	 \forgetall \nohyphens \hsize1mm
	 % treat non-breakable space as a normal one
	 \catcode`~=13\let~=\space
	 % treat en-dash as a normal one
	 \catcode`-=\active \def-{ } % ERROR
	 \bgroup#1\egroup\egroup
	 \newcounter\NOfLines
	 \beginshapebox \unvcopy0 \endshapebox
	 \reshapebox{\doglobal\increment\NOfLines}
	 #1\crlf\unvbox0\crlf words: \NOfLines\crlf}

\starttext

\startstatistics
abc~def ghi-jkl -- mno --- prs
\stopstatistics

% works OK
%abc-def -- ghi --- jkl
% \catcode`-=\active \def-{ }
%abc-def -- ghi --- jkl

\stoptext