Text Field "Statistics" script

[Brian Yennie]

Here are some rough ideas to get you started.

> 1.      Total number of words in the text field

put the number of words in fld "myField" into numWords

>
> 2.      Total number of Paragraphs in the text field

You would have to define what constitutes a paragraph, but, for example:

## <carriage return> means new paragraph
put 0 into paragraphCount
repeat for each char c in fld "myField"
   if (c = cr) then add 1 to paragraphCount
end repeat

For more complicated definitions of "paragraph" you might use offset() 
to search for certain character sequences.

>
> 3.      Total number of Sentences in the text field

Similar to #2, except maybe with a list of sentence-ending punctuation:

put 0 into sentenceCount
repeat for each char c in fld "myField"
   if (c is in "?!.") then add 1 to sentenceCount
end repeat


> 4.      Total number of sentences per paragraph

Combination of #2 and #3 might work... something like:

## initialize
put 0 into paragraphCount
put 0 into sentenceCount
put empty into sentenceCounts
repeat for each char c in fld "myField"
   ## new paragraph: store the sentence count from the last one
   if (c = cr) then
       put sentenceCount into line paragraphCount of sentenceCounts
       add 1 to paragraphCount
       put 0 into sentenceCount
   end if
   if (c is in "?!.") then add 1 to sentenceCount
end repeat
answer sentenceCounts ## displays counts one per line for each paragraph


> 5.      Average number of words in a sentence

Something like #3, except try tracking your current position. Each time 
you finish a sentence, use a chunk expression like:
put the number of words in char (sentenceStart) to (sentenceEnd) into 
numWords

> 6.      Total number of passive verbs (this one would be probably 
> involve a
> small database/flat file to search and compare through?)

Try "repeat for each word" and lookup the words...

>
> Ideas and help are greatly appreciated. Since I don’t know much about 
> the coding
> language yet, the more specific the better. Thank you all!

Hope that gives you a head start. I think you'll find if you get a 
little further along, you can come back and gets lots more help here!

- Brian