incorrect word count compared to wc -w

[anarcat]

Markdown mode doesn't seem to support telling Emacs to skip certain characters to make sure word counts are accurate. An example of a recent text I wrote counts almost a thousand more words than wc.

Expected Behavior

anarcat@curie:anarc.at$ wc -w blog/2022-08-26-nationalize-internet.md
4475 blog/2022-08-26-nationalize-internet.md
anarcat@curie:anarc.at$ wc  blog/2022-08-26-nationalize-internet.md
  613  4475 34316 blog/2022-08-26-nationalize-internet.md

Actual Behavior

M-x count-words gives me:

Buffer has 613 lines, 5459 words, and 34267 characters.

Kind of fascinating that the byte count is different as well. I suspect that might be a bug in wc, where it would count UTF-8 characters as multiple characters instead of single ones.

Steps to Reproduce

1. load this file in an emacs buffer with markdown-mode enabled
2. M-x count-words

Backtrace

N/A

Software Versions

• Markdown Mode: 2.4, from Debian stable packages
• Emacs: GNU Emacs 27.1 (build 1, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.24.24, cairo version 1.16.0) of 2021-03-27, modified by Debian
• OS: Debian GNU/Linux stable "bullseye"

[syohex]

I suppose that wc -w treats only spaces as a word separator. While emacs treats spaces, punctuations, quotes etc as a word separator. For example,

title="How"

wc -w counts this as 1 word, while emacs counts this as 2 words.

You can change emacs behavior through syntax-table configuration. Please modify your syntax-table configuration in markdown-mode, if you want emacs to work same as wc

Reference

• https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Syntax-Tables.htmll

[anarcat]

i understand where the bug comes from, what I am saying is i think markdown-mode should ship with such a syntax table. is there a table that i missed?

[syohex]

markdown-mode should ship with such a syntax table

This is impossible. If markdown-mode uses such a syntax table, then many markdown commands and highlighting don't work as expected. And it also changes behaviors of many other commands such as word moving commands(M-f, M-b etc), symbol moving commands(C-M-f, C-M-b etc) and so on.

You can modify syntax-table personally . Please check markdown-mode-syntax-table and modify it as you expected in your configuration file. (You can see the current buffer syntax by M-x describe-syntax.)