problem with counting words

[larry at significantplanet.org]

Easy to say, but how does one replace the quotes with curly-quotes?
I can't find out where it says how to do that.
Sorry I'm so lame.
Larry

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jerry Jensen" <jhj at jhj.com>
To: "How to use LiveCode" <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2014 1:26 PM
Subject: Re: problem with counting words


> Ah, and then there are tabs to deal with, and double-spaces will count an 
> empty item between. It may be better to just replace the quotes with 
> curly-quotes, count the words, and then replace the curly-quotes back to 
> quotes if you want.
>
> On Oct 12, 2014, at 12:20 PM, Jerry Jensen <jhj at jhj.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Larry,
>>
>> the itemDel is the character that delimits ITEMS, not words. You could 
>> use it to get around your problem with quotes. If you set the itemDel to 
>> space, you would then look for the number of ITEMS in the field. Thats 
>> not quite the end of it though, because there may not be a space between 
>> lines in the field, only returns. So, you could add up the number of 
>> items in each line - something like:
>>
>> put 0 into tCount
>> set the itemDel to space
>> repeat for each line L in field "foo"
>>  add the number of items in L to tCount
>> end repeat
>>
>> (not tested)
>>
>> .Jerry
>>
>> On Oct 12, 2014, at 11:17 AM, larry at significantplanet.org wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I'm posting this to help any other poor saps who run into this insanity:
>>>
>>> I want to count the words in a field.  I have:
>>>
>>> set the itemDel to space
>>>
>>> put the number of words of field "myTest" into field "myNumber"
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Here is what happens:
>>>
>>> I am testing the word count in LiveCode 6.1.1. Believe it or not, 
>>> LiveCode will count all these words
>>>
>>> as 23 words "because everything contained within the quotes is counted 
>>> as ONE word!!!"
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> There is nothing that I could find that says LiveCode will treat 
>>> everything within quotes as one word, even when I have itemDel set to 
>>> space.
>>>
>>> I doubt the RunRev people will see this as a bug, but "just how it is." 
>>> Well, it's really stupid - and beyond that, it is not documented in the 
>>> Dictionary that I could see.
>>>
>>> btw, I spoke to a programmer friend of mine (who used to work for 
>>> Novell) and he said he'd never heard anything like that in the several 
>>> programming languages he knows.
>>>
>>> Yes, I do know how to do a work around to count all the actual words, 
>>> but that is not the point.  The point is that I wasted over 2 hours of 
>>> my time figuring out why my word count was inaccurate.
>>>
>>> quite depressed,
>>>
>>> Larry
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> use-livecode mailing list
>>> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
>>> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your 
>>> subscription preferences:
>>> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> use-livecode mailing list
>> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
>> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your 
>> subscription preferences:
>> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> use-livecode mailing list
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your 
> subscription preferences:
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode