Is there some function or script to count characters (letters without
whitespaces) in vim?
For example Kile the Latex Editor has such a feature to control how long
texts are.
You can use
:%s/\w/&/g
which will report back "X substitutions on Y lines". "X"
represents the number of characters of interest. Adjust the "\w"
regexp for whatever constitutes your definiton of "characters"
that you want to count. Thus, this might be
:%s/\a/&/g "(only letters)
:%s/\S/&/g "(non-whitespace)
Or any other such combo.
It does have the side effect of "modifying" your document
(setting the "modified" flag). If this is a problem, you can
"u"ndo it and it should revert. It also requires that the
document not be readonly (or at least it will gripe if it is,
warning you that you're changing a RO document).
If you have fewer than 'report' characters, Vim won't report back:
:help 'report'
but you can set this to
:set report=0
to always report any changes.
There are ways to do it on non-modifiable buffers, but they
require a bit more programatic logic, such as
:let x=0
:g/^/let x+=strlen(substitute(getline('.'), '\W', '', 'g'))
:echo x
where the '\W' is the inverse-set of characters of interest. In
this case, if you're interested in "\w" characters, the "\W" is
the inverse. If you're interested in non-whitespace characters
("\s"), you would use "\S"; and if you're interested in counting
vowels, you could use "[^aeiouAEIOU]".
You might even notice that the second version uses a :g command
that matches every line. With this, you have a lot of flexibility:
:'<,'>g/^/let ... " counts characters in the linewise selection
:g/foo/let ... " counts characters on lines containing "foo"
and the like.
All sorts of fun things at your disposal :) Hope this helps,
-tim
