Feature request: ignore space characters

[bendix3]

I would love to see an option to exclude space characters in the settings, as is done with the newline characters.

[OleMchls]

Hey @bendix3,

I'm torn on this, word count has a bunch of setting already. And I fear it becomes more and more confusing to people opening the settings tab. In writing when you reference a article word/character count spaces are usually included. I wonder what is your exact use case, would you care to share?

Would you see any option to incorporate this into any existing feature/setting?

[bendix3]

Hey @Nesquick,

Incorporating this into an existing feature doesn't seem feasible to me, as they're all very specific. I do admit that for most use cases characters are counted including spaces, but I stumble upon other cases from time to time, currently the application form for the German open source fund Prototypefund. I certainly wouldn't mind another setting after Ignore Markdown code blocks.

Because adding 10% of the character count without spaces usually gives you roughly the amount with them included, the problem isn't exactly dire. I suppose adding the feature only makes sense if there's others that would find it useful.

[pwrobinson]

I know of several online systems for research grants that only count non-whitespace characters. I'm currently using one of them, which prompted me to post this.

[OleMchls]

I'm happy to see any PR that addressed this issue – however simply adding another option with another if will probably increase the complexity of the plugin to an extent I'm not willing to support. So I'm happy to take ideas and encourage you all to propose an implementation.

[davidlday]

@bendix3 @pwrobinson For clarification, is the request to exclude space characters (i.e. ' ') or all whitespace characters (i.e. the regex [ \t\r\n\v\f])? I suspect the latter, but the title implies the former.

[bendix3]

@davidlday I wrote the request with space characters and markdown in mind, but I don't need any whitespace to be counted. Thanks for looking into this!