count-the-number-of-words-on-a-webpage.md

Count The Number Of Words On A Webpage

I was reading through a couple sections of the postfix documentation and I was astounded at how large the webpage is, and that is just for the main.cf file format.

Curiosity got the best of me and I wanted to get a sense of the magnitude of the page. A word count seemed like a good measure.

Using pandoc and a couple other unix utilities, I was able to quickly get that number.

curl -s http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html\#virtual_mailbox_maps | pandoc -f html -t plain | wc -w
   88383

Generically, that is:

curl -s url | pandoc -f html -t plain | wc -w

Pandoc produces a plain-text version of the HTML page that was pulled in by curl and then we use wc to get a word (-w) count.