Bug 62799 - Word count counts dashes as words - update Help for Word Count additional separators
Summary: Word count counts dashes as words - update Help for Word Count additional sep...
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Documentation (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
Inherited From OOo
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL: https://help.libreoffice.org/6.4/en-U...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: Word-Count
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Reported: 2013-03-27 08:59 UTC by Will Kemp
Modified: 2023-06-26 16:57 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:

Attachments
There are 5 words here, but LibreOffice counts 6 (8.81 KB, application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text)
2013-03-27 08:59 UTC, Will Kemp 		Details
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Description Will Kemp 2013-03-27 08:59:38 UTC 
Created attachment 77089 [details]
There are 5 words here, but LibreOffice counts 6

Word count gives the wrong result if there are any dashes ("-") in the text. It counts them as words if they're "independent" - i.e., not if they're joining two words.
Comment 1 Brenda Granados 2013-03-28 14:20:58 UTC 
Hi, thank you for submitting a bug report. This bug is related to Bug 38983 : Word counts incorrectly with dashes and other separators. It seems that the algorithm LibreOffice uses to determine word count does so by seeing the spaces in between words. That's why 

There are five-words here
There are five- words here
There are five -words here

... all result in a word count of 5, but 

There are five - words here

... results in a word count of 6.

What you can do, as a user in the other bug report mentioned, is go to
Comment 2 Brenda Granados 2013-03-28 14:26:12 UTC 
Sorry, I cut off my last comment. 

The workaround for the incorrect word count is go to Tools -> Options -> LibreOffice Writer -> General, and in the Word Count, additional separators box, add the "-" character.  After you click OK, and run the word count again, it counts 5 words.

Edit to my previous comment: word count on "There are five-words  here" is 4 words.

I will mark this as an enhancement request to have "-" character as default.


Version: 4.0.2.1 (Build ID: 7e5467ff8f30d821f4fbf69cb2769163eb64c2c)
Platform: Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS x64


- Brenda
Comment 3 Timur 2019-10-16 12:00:59 UTC 
Repro 6.4+. Seems like an easy hack. 
Now in Options/Writer/Word Count: additional separators we have —– which is — and –. I don't know what it is, and it's not explained in Help, but doesn't work as a dash. If dash added, it's not counted.
Comment 4 Timur 2019-10-16 12:12:26 UTC 
Those are emdash and endash and this all works as intended.
But instead of closing the bug, let's convert to Documentation so that help for Word Count explains that default additional separators are emdash and endash.
And what's nicely explained in https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38983#c15.
That can be related to https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Inserting_Protected_Spaces,_Hyphens_and_Conditional_Separators and https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Options_1.