TinyMCE: wordcount plugin is not counting special characters as word - tinymce

Question

I have added the plugin wordcount to count the number of words entered in my TinyMCE texteditor.
plugins: "wordcount",
wordcount_cleanregex: /[.(),;:!?%#$?\x27\x22_+=\\/\-]*/g
It is counting letters and numbers but when I am giving a special character , it is not counting them.
for e.g ----
Hi I am 18 year old (for this it is giving me count 6)
Hi I am ## year old (for this it is giving me count 5)
Any idea what I need to do. I tried to remove:
%#$ from wordcount_cleanregex , but it didn't work.

Answer 1

Your issue is not with the wordcount_cleanregex setting but rather with the wordcount_countregex setting:
https://www.tinymce.com/docs/plugins/wordcount/#wordcount_countregex
If you look at the default one you will see why its skipping the characters that it is. Here is the exact regex:
https://regex101.com/r/wL4fL1/1
If you tweak that regex you can get it to count your ## as a word.
Note: There is some core cleaning that is done within the wordcount plugin that is done regardless of your configuration settings. In TinyMCE 4.4.1 it looks like this:
if (tx) {
tx = tx.replace(/\.\.\./g, ' '); // convert ellipses to spaces
tx = tx.replace(/<.[^<>]*?>/g, ' ').replace(/ | /gi, ' '); // remove html tags and space chars
// deal with html entities
tx = tx.replace(/(\w+)(&#?[a-z0-9]+;)+(\w+)/i, "$1$3").replace(/&.+?;/g, ' ');
tx = tx.replace(cleanre, ''); // remove numbers and punctuation
var wordArray = tx.match(countre);
if (wordArray) {
tc = wordArray.length;
}
}
...so some core things are still stripped from your content regardless of what you put in the wordcount_cleanregex and wordcount_countregex. If you want to change this core behavior you will need to modify the plugin's source code.

Answer 2

here is my wordcount plugin which I am adding externally , The function getCount returns the number of words perfectly when I run this function seprately on my .aspx page as javascript function, but when I am running under this plugin it is only counting letters (it is not counting any number/special characters)
tinymce.PluginManager.add('wordcount', function(editor) {
function update() {
editor.theme.panel.find('#wordcount').text(['Words: {0}', getCount()]);
}
editor.on('init', function() {
var statusbar = editor.theme.panel && editor.theme.panel.find('#statusbar')[0];
if (statusbar) {
tinymce.util.Delay.setEditorTimeout(editor, function() {
statusbar.insert({
type: 'label',
name: 'wordcount',
text: ['Words: {0}', getCount()],
classes: 'wordcount',
disabled: editor.settings.readonly
}, 0);
editor.on('setcontent beforeaddundo', update);
editor.on('keyup', function(e) {
if (e.keyCode == 32) {
update();
}
});
}, 0);
}
});
getCount = function () {
var body = editor.getBody().innerHTML;
text1 = body.replace(/<[^>]+>/g, '');
s = text1.replace(/ /g, ' ');
s = s.replace(/(^\s*)|(\s*$)/gi, "");//exclude start and end white-space
s = s.replace(/[ ]{2,}/gi, " ");//2 or more space to 1
s = s.replace(/\n /, "\n"); // exclude newline with a start spacing
return s.split(' ').length;
};
});