QuickTip: Counting Text using everyItem()

Counting words and also paragraphs, stories, characters is something pretty easy to achieve, but very often done in wrong way. Most of the time, people are looping through stories, text frames, paragraphs and adding word count. That is OK, for short documents, with short stories, but as document length increases, script needs more and more time to loop through all stories, and get all words. People are forgetting about awesome method called everyItem! Method remained undocumented until InDesign CS3, but scripting experts such as Dave Saunders had already pointed out its forcefulness and already knew how to exploit it. It allows us to get all elements within collection. For more info about everyItem method be sure to check two awesome articles by Marc Autret: On ‘everyItem()’ – Part 1 and On ‘everyItem()’ – Part 2. So, let’s take a look how everyItem method can help us count stuff. 🙂

First, let’s take a look how to count words using loop:

var myDoc = app.activeDocument;
var myWords = 0;
for (var i = 0; myDoc.stories.length > i; i++)
    myWords += myDoc.stories[i].words.length

alert("Document contains " + myWords + " words.");

Now, let’s use everyItem method:

var myWords = app.activeDocument.stories.everyItem().words.length;

alert("Document contains " + myWords + " words.");

Isn’t it faster and easier? One row against four! Furthermore, we can use same technique to count paragraphs, characters, footnotes, and even text inside tables! Here are some examples:

var myStories = app.activeDocument.stories.everyItem();

// all paragraphs in document
var myParagraphs = myStories.paragraphs.length;

// all characters in document
var myCharacters = myStories.characters.length;

// all words inside footnotes
var myFootWords = myStories.footnotes.everyItem().words.length;

// all characters inside footnotes
var myFootCharacters = myStories.footnotes.everyItem().characters.length;

// all words inside tables
var myTableWords = myStories.tables.everyItem().cells.everyItem().words.length;

Next, we can also count text in selected text frame, or parent story of selected text frame:

var mySel = app.selection[0];

// all words inside selected text frame, even if frame is threaded
var mySelWords = mySel.texts.everyItem().words.length;

// all words inside selected text frame story
var mySelStoryWords = mySel.parentStory.words.length;