php-text-statistics Google Group

Interesting tool!

mike.giff...@gmail.com (Mike Gifford) — Fri, 10 Oct 2009 15:14:55 UT

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

joel...@cyberone.com.au (Joel Nation) — Sun, 09 Sep 2009 10:40:22 UT

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

ac3bu...@yahoo.com (merald ACE) — Sun, 09 Sep 2009 01:51:39 UT

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

tony.tarrow.arrowsmi...@gmail.com (sooty) — Thu, 09 Sep 2009 11:56:41 UT

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

tpwal...@gmail.com (TomW) — Sun, 03 Mar 2009 10:49:35 UT

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

tpwal...@gmail.com (TomW) — Sun, 03 Mar 2009 10:36:17 UT

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

tpwal...@gmail.com (TomW) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 23:19:37 UT

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

ac3bu...@yahoo.com (merald ACE) — Fri, 01 Jan 2009 16:25:10 UT

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

d...@addedbytes.com (David Child) — Fri, 01 Jan 2009 10:02:06 UT

"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

ac3bu...@gmail.com (ac3buddy@gmail.com) — Fri, 01 Jan 2009 01:45:41 UT

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

kapel...@gmail.com (Adam Kapelner) — Wed, 01 Jan 2009 18:46:37 UT

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

d...@addedbytes.com (David Child) — Wed, 01 Jan 2009 10:02:25 UT

Great work Adam!

translated to Ruby

kapel...@gmail.com (way4thesub) — Tue, 01 Jan 2009 23:16:45 UT

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

d...@addedbytes.com (David Child) — Sat, 10 Oct 2008 13:04:38 UT

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

d...@addedbytes.com (David Child) — Sat, 10 Oct 2008 13:00:07 UT

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.

Re: Readability of html

joel...@cyberone.com.au (Joel Nation) — Thu, 10 Oct 2008 06:53:37 UT

I agree, they do look a little dodgey (especially when it's really
random numbers), but they have all been tested and there relative
effectiveness has been ranked (dale-chall being the best one I know
of). I think we can use computers in another way - to suggest how to
improve the text. Since most of them rely on sentence length, the

Re: Readability of html

d...@addedbytes.com (David Child) — Tue, 10 Oct 2008 10:27:20 UT

Hi Joel,
Great work. Will run tests against PHPUnit when at home later, but all
looks fine.
I've been working, sporadically, on a few of the other various
readability scores, including Spache and Dale-Chall. Would be great to
see what you've come up with for Dale-Chall so far.
Some of the readability scores are decidedly ropey, I've come to

Re: Readability of html

joel...@cyberone.com.au (Joel Nation) — Tue, 10 Oct 2008 10:00:58 UT

Okay I checked in my first changes. This covers all the HTML tags we
use at my work that should have a full stop in front of them. There
may be a couple of others, but this should cover the vast majority of
HTML use. I didn't use a preg_replace, more comfortable out of the
world of regexps! I don't have PHP4, but I'll check in a PHP4 version

Re: Readability of html

d...@addedbytes.com (David Child) — Thu, 09 Sep 2008 18:17:32 UT

Hi Joel,
Good points all. I've added you as a member to the project at
[link] - you should be able to
commit code now. Looking forward to seeing your additions!
Dave

Readability of html

joel...@cyberone.com.au (Joel Nation) — Mon, 09 Sep 2008 09:21:49 UT

The problem with these readability scores is that they don't take into
consideration the way html works. For instance you very rarely put a
full stop in a heading tag (eg: <h1>Hello.</h1>) but this will affect
most of the scores as that word will now be added to the next sentence
and make it longer then it actually is. And with lots of headings you