How to Count Words with PowerShell

In this blog post, we will go over how to count words using PowerShell and explore some useful cmdlets that make the task easier.

Counting words is a task that can be done in many ways using different tools, and PowerShell is one of them. In this blog post, we will go over how to count words using PowerShell and explore some useful cmdlets that make the task easier.

Before we get started, it is important to note that counting words in PowerShell requires the text to be in a format that PowerShell can read. Text files are a common format, and PowerShell can read them easily. However, if the text is in a different format, such as a PDF or an image, it will need to be converted to a text format before PowerShell can count the words.

For example, if we have a text file called “example.txt”, we can use the following command to read the contents:

Get-Content example.txt

Use the Measure-Object cmdlet to count the words Now that we have the contents of the text file as a string, we can use the “Measure-Object” cmdlet to count the words. This cmdlet counts the number of objects in a collection, which in our case, are the words in the text file.

To count the words, we need to first split the string into an array of words using the “-split” operator. We can then pipe the resulting array to the “Measure-Object” cmdlet with the “-Word” parameter.

For example, the following command counts the words in the contents of “example.txt”:

(Get-Content example.txt -Raw) -split '\s+' | Measure-Object -Word