Page counter

Hello! This is small Python library and commandline tool to count number of standard pages in the text, files and folders. Comes with common standard page dialects builtin, but is super easy to define your very own method of page counting.

Standard page is primary good unit of text length because it's doesn't take into account any formatting but the text itself only. It's useful e.g. when you want to know how much pages you wrote and how much will you get pay. Standard pages are used among book authors and publishers, translators and their clients, in newspaper world and many other areas.

Page Counter can be used as Python library called page_counter, or easy-to-use commandline tool called page-counter.

Installation

Installation will bring on your computer the both - library and commandline tool. Page Counter requires Python 3 installed. Then install it in standard Python way with

pip install page-counter

Page Counter as Python Library

Page Counter as API has two parts: PageCounter class and functions called standard page dialects that does page counting itself dialects.

PageCounter() class has only one required parameter: text to analyse:

page_counter = PageCounter("There were froggies by the lake, "
                           "they were thinking what to make.")

Second only PageCounter`s parameter is optional flag to clean out HTML tags from the text. This is disabled by default but if you pass for example <p class="intro">sometext</p> it will use sometext as text to analyse:

page_counter = PageCounter("<p class="verse">There were froggies by the lake, "
                           "they were thinking what to make.</p>", strip_html=True)

There are only four intuitive methods of PageCounter instance:

• chars_with_spaces() says number of characters including space character
• chars_without_spaces() says number of characters except for space character
• word_count() says number of words
• page_count(dialect) says how many pages has the text computed using specified standard page dialect.

All methods returns integer number. page_count() called with builtin dialect never returns zero pages - even one word or one letter long text is at least one page. Your custom dialects may behave differently.

Standard page dialects

There is no universally accepted standard page. You easily come across different dialects based on country, convention or organization-specific. PageCounter is ready for this variability. As a parameter to page_count() you must specify some page dialect. Dialect argument may be of str for builtin dialects, or of callable for your own dialects.

If argument is of str, it must be builtin dialect name. Builtin dialect names are defined in page_counter.dialect_names list. For example:

number_of_pages = page_counter.page_count('cz_sk_1800_chars_space_savvy_standard_page')

Or you can write your own dialect callable (i.e. a function for our purposes) and pass it to page_count(). Your dialect function must accept PageCounter instance. Use PageCounter methods to compute page count. Example of simple dialect function:

def my_company_page_standard(page_counter):
  return page_counter.chars_with_spaces // 1500

number_of_pages = page_counter.page_count(my_company_page_standard)

If you think your standard page dialects should be builtin dialect, consider sharing it as an issue or (better) as a pull request.

Builtin standard page dialects

Currently PageCounter includes the following builtin page dialects.

• cz_sk_1800_chars_standard_page - Czech and Slovak standard page (normostrana) is 1800 chars per page including spaces.
• cz_sk_1800_chars_space_savvy_standard_page - Czech and Slovak standard page (normostrana) is 1800 chars per page excluding multiple spaces.
• uk_1000_words_standard_page - UK standard page is 1000 words per page.
• eu_1500_chars_standard_page - Standard page used in many EU countries is 1500 chars per page including spaces.
• eu_1500_chars_space_savvy_standard_page - Standard page used in many EU countries is 1500 chars per page excluding multiple spaces.

Page Counter commandline tool

By installing PageCounter you will also get handy commandline tool page-counter for page count detection in single file or files in a folder. Usage:

page-counter <dialect> <file>
page-counter <dialect> <folder> <file_extension>

For example to count pages in readme.rst in current directory using Czech standard page dialect:

page-counter cz_sk_1800_standard_pages readme.rst

For example to count pages recursively in all *.txt or *.TXT files in ~/books/python-for-novices/:

page-counter cz_sk_1800_standard_pages ~/books/python-for-novices/ txt

If you execute page-counter without parameters or with invalid number of parameters, you will get list of known builtin standard page dialects.

Contributing

If you have something you'd like to contribute, the best approach is to send a well-formed pull request, complete with tests and documentation, as needed. Pull requests should be focused: trying to do more than one thing in a single request will make it more difficult to process.