Hi, could you provide a document where the count is wrong and tell us which version and operating system you are using. 
For information, if I cut and paste "développeur·se", "développeur(se)", "développeur/se" or ""développeu-se" in Writer I get 5 words, 73 char. including spaces, 69 excluding spaces which is the right number of words. So I can't reproduce your issue in version 6.4.0.2 or 7.0 alpha.

Setting to NEEDINFO meanwhile

Except the fact I'm strongly against gender neutral writing because it's ridiculous and make text hardly readable, I don't know anything about word counting process.
I can't help here=>uncc myself.

Created attachment 160765 [details]
Screenshot of the erreoneous count for French

Created attachment 160766 [details]
Screenshot of the correct count for English

Created attachment 160767 [details]
ODT file with erroneous count example text

I added an odt file which the French count is 4 words instead of 2, a screenshot of the erroneous count and, for contrast, a screenshot of the correct count for the English text (showing that quotations marks should not be counted as words).

I am using 6.4.2.2 on Ubuntu 20.4.

Sorry if I was unclear with the inclusive writing stuff, LO counts it perfectly right, I was only trying to say that what seemed to me as the obvious solution could mess this up.

(In reply to Philippe from comment #4)
> Created attachment 160765 [details]
> Screenshot of the erreoneous count for French

As far as I can see the word count follows the rules of LO: "In general, every string of characters between two spaces is a word." [1].

So I won't consider this as  bug, but as an enhancement request. I assume, that "white spaces" are nonbreaking spaces, right? So could you change bug summary in a way, that makes your idea more clear? Thank you.


[1] https://help.libreoffice.org/7.0/en-GB/text/swriter/01/06040000.html?&DbPAR=WRITER&System=WIN

(In reply to Philippe from comment #7)
Hello

As a French user of Open Office, I totally agree with you, Philippe, the Word Count feature does not give the expected result for the French language. 

Word counting looks a trivial task but there are some rules in French. 
For example, all symbols that are not letters or numbers count for nothing: 
This is the case with punctuation marks (comma, period, colon, semi-colon, exclamation mark, question mark), hyphens, dashes, apostrophes, quotation marks, parentheses, and square brackets…. 

There is a web application that takes into account these rules: https://www.combiendemots.com/
The web clearly announces to be more efficient than Word and so on than OpenOffice since it gives same results… 

Enhance the Word Count feature could be an interesting marketing point because there are several administrative or educational procedures that require precise word counting and may have a big impact on the user life. 

So It could be a great enhancement for OpenOffice to offer a tool efficient enough that French users no need to copy and paste their text to another tool.

So I've changed bug summary.

Sophie, in comment 1 you've asked for a document. Is it possible for you to have a look at the document from comment 6?

I confirm that the word count in the test file is clearly wrong. String without alphanumerical character can't be considered as word.

For me it is a bug not an enhancement.

Set status to NEW.

Best regards. JBF