Talk:Word frequency: Difference between revisions
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::What I mean is, Nigel, that what constitutes a word for the purposes of this task, needs to be defined. Without such a definition, any definition of a word becomes suspect. It is best that the tasks definition of a word is succinct and defined in such a way as to be reproducible in many languages. "Whatever wordprocessor X defines as a word in its word count" doesn't seem like a good enough description ''for the purposes of a task''. --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] ([[User talk:Paddy3118|talk]]) 15:02, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
:::Really, the only thing at all in question to my mind is, is underscore a letter or not? On the face of it, it seems clear; no, of course not. So should the word "_The" in the text be counted as "_the" or "the"? The \w assertion in PCRE (which most languages use directly or emulate) includes underscore for historical reasons, so "_the" and "the" are counted as different words. On the other hand, does the word "Alèthe" contain any non-letter characters? It is awfully narrow-minded to insist that "if you can't fit it in 7 bits, it ain't a character." That being said, I think disregarding hyphenated words and contractions with embedded apostrophes when counting words is ridiculous too so I added a second version which accounts for them, but it doesn't meet the task requirements as written (hence it being a ''second'' version).
==Using Microsoft Word 2010 to count words==
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