php-text-statistics Google Group

Interesting tool!

2009-10-09T15:14:55Z

I'm interested in building a module for Drupal that automatically
reports on the readability of the text that's been entered. I had run
across some command line tools, but doing it all in PHP sounds much
easier to adopt.

This is part of a larger accessibility evaluation that we're doing,
but I wanted to just thank you for contributing this code to the

Re: Readability Grades

2009-09-06T10:40:22Z

It depends. It depends on the reading grade score you use. If we take
the Flesch-Kincaid reading grade level then this gives us the level of
schooling that a reader would require if they were to read your text.
Ie: if you get a reading grade level of 7 then this means that the
reader would need to have an education level equivalent to year 7

Re: Readability Grades

2009-09-06T01:51:39Z

Good day , as far as the readability formulas are concern, they are just tools to measure or predict how comprehensible a "technical text" might be.
With regards to literary pieces such as prose or poems, applying readability formulas could be such a waste why?
Youre the apple of my eye , and you are beautiful to me may mean the same thing, when using the readability formulas, word, sentence and paragraph length are considered therefore making prose and poem somehow an exception due to the meaning they have regardless of how long or short it could be.

Readability Grades

2009-09-03T11:56:41Z

When writing short stories or novels how valuable is readability
grades when assessing the quality of your writing? Without going into
grammar correction programs. Plus when judging assessment levels
concerning Average grade levels, what is considerer an expectable
Average grade level? I have read volumes, regarding Average grade

Re: Multi-byte string functions

2009-03-29T10:49:35Z

I wrapped function_exists('mb_*') checks around each of the sections
where a multi-byte function called. Is this the reason why there are
try catch blocks wrapped around them? If so, I can remove the try
catch blocks as they didn't work to avoid the case where the mb_*
functions were not available.

Multi-byte string functions

2009-03-29T10:36:17Z

The PHP installation does not have the multi-byte string functions
enabled by default. Is there a way to determine if they are enabled
and then use them, and otherwise skip straight to the built-in strlen?

Integration with HTML-Kit

2009-03-17T23:19:37Z

Hello,

For background, I regularly use an editor known as HTML-Kit (http://
[link]) for web site work. It is extensible through a wide-
ranging plugin system. On the support newsgroups a couple of weeks
ago, there was a question about writing some sort of readability
statistics plugin. It has been a few years since the last time I wrote

Readability Questions

2009-01-16T16:25:10Z

Thank you so much Mr. David Child for that prompt response, Im still somehow confused. Now that you mention it. Does it affect the credibility? Does it no longer necessarily mean that the shorter the number of words used, the higher the grade will be? My defense is approaching and I'm looking into what i can consider loophole with our study regarding readability statistics. What are the implications of your explanation about the average syllables? What could be the best suggestion in order for us to have a higher grade. Thank You so much and Good Day to all.

Re: Grading

2009-01-16T10:02:06Z

"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." - 94.3
"The lazy dog was jumped over by the quick brown fox." - 95.7

The difference is the addition of the two words "was" and "by".
Although the second sentence is slightly longer, the shorter words
help reduce the average syllable count, which is why the scores are

Grading

2009-01-16T01:45:41Z

Hi guys. i know it might somehow sound odd but i thought , based on
the rules of readability . the active voice which has fewer words than
passive ones .. But when i checked the phrase The quick brown fox jump
over the lazy dog and " The lazy dog, was jumped over by the quick
brown fox." the latter rendered a higher score. Please help me.. This

Re: translated to Ruby

2009-01-07T18:46:37Z

My pleasure.

I couldn't figure out how to translate that one line in the clean text
function:
('$matches', 'return strtolower($matches[0]);'), $strText); // Lower
case all words following terminators (for gunning fog score)

So I guess that's the reason why my Gunning-Fog is off a bit.

Would you mind adding these two files to the repository? I won't have any

Re: translated to Ruby

2009-01-07T10:02:25Z

Great work Adam!

translated to Ruby

2009-01-06T23:16:45Z

Hello all,

I've translated the php-text-statistics package to Ruby, you can view
the files below. Please note I couldn't get the Gunning Fog Score to
work 100%

Regards,
Adam

require 'collections/sequenced_hash'

module ReadabilityIndices

class Readability

NumDecimalPlaces = 1

Re: Readability of html

2008-10-11T13:04:38Z

And I completely forgot to actually reply to the bulk of your message,
Joel. Sorry about that - was distracted by bacon :)
I think that's a great idea - identifying places for improvements, and
highlighting difficult words, would make a really useful tool. Making
blanket suggestions is a good start, and a synonym mashup would be

Re: Readability of html

2008-10-11T13:00:07Z

I've run the unit tests and your changes work fine on the test text -
great stuff, Joel.
It would be useful to have some test HTML to run unit tests against.
I'll start putting some together. I'm also trying to sort out the
Dale-Chall and Spache unit tests. I've added the word lists to the
repository already so others can have a play with them if they want.