[NTLUG:Discuss] Counting key presses in a file...

[Robert Citek]

On 08/27/2007 03:13 PM, Richard Geoffrion wrote:
> I know that 'wc' can count words and lines, but how would one count.  
> While 'a' would constitute ONE keystroke, 'A' would constitute two. 
> (Shift + a).

Not necessarily.  If you have CapsLock on, then the reverse would be
true. That is, 'A' would count as one and 'a' as two.  What would happen
if it was a string of 'A's, as in AAA?  I only used four keystrokes:
CapLock followed by three 'a's.  What about longer strings, like
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA?  In that case it took me two keystrokes: shift plus
press and hold 'a'.

> Carriage returns would count as one while bolding text
> would constitute four keystrokes as one would need a CTRL-B to turn 
> bolding on and another to turn bolding off.

What if I type 'a^Hah'?  What if I type 'a{left arrow}h'?  What if I
type 'ah'?  They all produce 'ah' but are a different number of
key-strokes.  Lastly, what about cut and paste?

> How would one go about taking an openoffice document saved in the 
> 97/2000 'Word' format and converting it into something that can be 
> parsed and counted?

If you can't use Word, which has a built-in counter, then open the
document in OpenOffice Writer, press Ctrl-A to highlight everything,
press Ctrl-C to copy all the text in the clipboard, open gedit, press
Ctrl-V to pasted the text into gedit, and save as a textfile
"foobar.txt"  Then open a terminal and type 'wc foobar.txt'.

Am I even close to answering your question?

Regards,
- Robert