In daily website content operations, we often need to count and control the length of the content, which is crucial for SEO, layout, and user reading experience. The Anqi CMS provides a series of practical template filters to help us complete these tasks, wherewordcountThis is a tool used to count the number of 'words' in a string.However, how is the boundary of the 'word' defined for Chinese content?This may be a question many users encounter when using it.
From a literal point of view,wordcountThe filter is intended to calculate how many 'words' are contained in a segment of text.In English context, this concept is relatively intuitive, usually distinguished by spaces between different words."Hello AnQiCMS World"Use{{ "Hello AnQiCMS World"|wordcount }}such template code, it will naturally return in the QMS.3because it recognizes three independent words separated by spaces.
But when we apply it to Chinese content, the situation is different. The characteristics of the Chinese language are that it does not have explicit word separators (such as spaces in English), which makeswordcountWhen processing pure Chinese text, it is treated as a continuous whole. Therefore, a sentence composed entirely of Chinese characters, regardless of its length, is considered a single unit as long as there are no English words or explicit spaces inserted in the middle.wordcountFilters will count it as1a "word". For example,{{ "欢迎使用安企内容管理系统"|wordcount }}it will return1English rather than based on the number of Chinese characters calculated to be 10 or more. Even for an entire article, if the content is continuous Chinese without being separated by other languages or spaces, the final result will still be1.
This is a common way for many programming languages and text processing tools to define the basic concept of 'word' without introducing complex natural language processing (NLP) modules - that is, by splitting through whitespace.For languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which lack explicit word separators, a large 'word' block is often formed when performing basic 'word' statistics for such tools.
What should I do if I need to count the actual number of Chinese characters in the content, rather than this special 'word' count? At this time, the Anqi CMS,lengthThe filter comes into play.lengthThe filter accurately counts the actual number of UTF-8 characters in a string. For Chinese, each character is counted as one character. Therefore,{{ "欢迎使用安企内容管理系统"|length }}it will accurately return10，because it counts ten Chinese characters. Similarly, if you need to truncate content by character length, you can usetruncatecharsa filter, which will also truncate based on the actual number of characters, rather thanwordcountThe "word" logic, which is very useful when limiting the length of article abstracts or titles.
In general,wordcountThe filter is more suitable for languages that require counting words separated by spaces (such as English), or for counting the number of blocks in content mixed with Chinese and English and clearly separated by delimiters. For purely Chinese content, if you want to know the exact number of characters,lengthThe filter is undoubtedly the more accurate, more intuitive choice. UnderstandingwordcountSpecial behavior in the Chinese context and flexible application according to actual needslengthFilter, which can help you manage multilingual content in Security CMS more efficiently and accurately.
Common Questions and Answers (FAQ)
1.wordcountandlengthWhat is the main difference in counting the length of content for the filter?
wordcountThe filter defines 'word' boundaries by identifying spaces in the text.For English and other languages, it can effectively count the number of words; but for Chinese, which does not use spaces to separate words, it usually treats continuous Chinese text as a single 'word', so it may only return 1.lengthFilter focuses more on counting the actual UTF-8 character count in a string, whether it is English, numbers, or Chinese characters, they are all counted as one character unit, which is more accurate when counting the character count of Chinese content.
2. WhywordcountFilter returns 1 frequently when processing a long Chinese content?This is becausewordcount
3. If my article content includes both Chinese and English, which filter should I use to count the number of characters or words?This depends on the specific target you want to count. If you need to count the number of words in the English part as well as the number of 'blocks' considered for the Chinese part (for example, Chinese and English paragraphs are separated by spaces),wordcountMay provide some rough references. But if you want to accurately count the total number of characters (including all Chinese characters and English letters), thenlengthFilter is a better choice.If your goal is to meet two statistical requirements at the same time, you may need to use both of these filters together, and even may need to customize some logic to handle the Chinese and English parts separately.