Count Words Java

Counting words in documents is a fundamental task across many fields, including legal tech, education, research, and business process automation. Whether you’re analyzing text for insights, enforcing content length policies, or simply preparing reports, knowing the total word count and frequency of each word offers valuable context. Automating this process with Java helps streamline workflows and eliminate the need for manual counting. With the help of Conholdate.Total for Java SDK, developers can programmatically extract text from various document types and perform efficient word count and frequency analysis within their Java applications. This blog post will guide you through how to achieve this functionality using a practical code example.

Why Count Words in Documents?

Here are several reasons why word counting is critical in document processing:

  1. Content Analysis & Readability: Helps determine if a document meets expected standards for length and readability.

  2. Legal Document Review: Ensures legal documents contain or omit specific clauses based on word presence.

  3. Academic Research: Supports automated assessment, term frequency analysis, and plagiarism detection.

  4. Search and Indexing: Boosts retrieval accuracy by indexing high-frequency terms and relevant keywords.

Count Words in PDF or Word Documents using Java

You need to configure Conholdate.Total for Java SDK in your environment. It allows you to work seamlessly with a variety of document formats including PDF, DOCX, TXT, and more. Using its document parsing capabilities, you can extract text and compute word frequencies without complex dependencies. Below is a complete Java code sample that demonstrates how to count words and generate a word frequency report from a PDF file. The following approach demonstrates how to extract selected pages from a PDF and save them as separate files.

try (com.groupdocs.parser.Parser parser = new com.groupdocs.parser.Parser("document.pdf")) {

    com.groupdocs.parser.data.TextReader reader = parser.getText();
    String text = reader.readToEnd();

    String[] words = text.split("\\s+|\\.|\\,|\\?|\\:|\\;");
    System.out.println("Length:" + words.length);

    Hashtable<String, Integer> wordCountTable = new Hashtable<String, Integer>();

    int minWordLength = 2;
    for (String word : words) {
        String uniqueWord = word.toLowerCase();
        if (uniqueWord.length() > minWordLength) {
            if (wordCountTable.containsKey(uniqueWord)) {
                wordCountTable.replace(uniqueWord, wordCountTable.get(uniqueWord),
                        wordCountTable.get(uniqueWord).intValue() + 1);
            } else {
                wordCountTable.put(uniqueWord, 1);
            }
        }
    }

    wordCountTable.entrySet().forEach(entry -> {
        System.out.println(entry.getKey() + ": " + entry.getValue());
    });
}

This code performs the following actions:

  • Parses the input PDF document to extract text.

  • Splits the content into words using whitespace and punctuation as delimiters.

  • Filters short, non-meaningful words and calculates the frequency of each significant word.

  • Outputs the total number of words and individual word counts for further analysis.

This solution can be extended to support multiple file formats supported by Conholdate.Total for Java, such as DOCX, RTF, and TXT, using similar logic.

Conclusion

Word counting is far more than just a metric, it’s a powerful tool for analysis, compliance, optimization, and decision-making. By integrating this capability into your Java applications using Conholdate.Total for Java SDK, you gain the ability to programmatically extract textual content and conduct detailed word frequency analysis. Whether you are building a document analyzer, educational software, or search engine, having access to accurate word count data empowers your application with intelligence and insight. Start integrating this functionality today and open the door to smarter document processing.

See Also