How do I display a character count within a post?

Do not edit the Twenty Eleven theme. It is the default WordPress 3.2 theme and having access to an unedited version of the theme is vital when dealing with a range of site issues.

Create a child theme for your customisations. Once your child theme is active, we should be able to help with the customisation.

Sorry forgot to mention that my child theme is active, and I’m running the site from a local server. Sorry esmi

Is this for the front or back end of the site? Only running a character count on the front end of the site could have a significant performance impact on the site.

I would like for it to be displayed on the front-end. However, if it would increase performance, I would be statisfied with a character count in the back end which I could copy and paste into the post I guess? Would be nice if it were a button that you could press or tick (add character count to post).

Have you had a look through these plugins: https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/search.php?q=character+count

Yeah, I had a try at those…

Just had another try and this one works better than I originally realised
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/posts-character-count-admin/

I thought that the character count only appeared in the ‘view all posts’ page, but it appears under the text box once the message has been saved.

I suppose this will actually do, thanks for pointing me in the right direct esmi, I hope I didn’t waste too much of you time x

No problem. It’s an interesting idea. I was about to see if I could come up with a basic coded solution to get you started when I thought I’d check through the Plugin Repo in case someone else had the same idea. ??

Hey Esmi, admin plugin works well in the backend, but thought I’d try a better solution so that it workd in the frontend too. As i want to display the character count in the frontend, so the plugin available isn’t the best. A friend made this plugin for me. It displays the characters used for each post.

<?php

//ADD FILTERS
add_filter('the_content', 'char_count_func');
function char_count_func($text)
{
  $count = strlen($text);
  if(is_page())
    return $text;
  else
    return $text.'<br/><b>'.$count.' characters including spaces.</b>';
}
?>

The problem with it is that punction symbols and line breaks are counted as more than one character. Is there a way to adjust this to count all symbols and line breaks as 1 character. Also how would you restrict this from certain post?

note: I found this code in another plugin which I think addreses the symbol count issue, but not the line break.

function get_characters() {
		if ($this->text == '') { return(0); }
		if ($this->characters != -1) { return($this->characters); }

		$count = strlen(utf8_decode($this->text));

		$this->characters = $count;
		return($count);
	}

Thanks

yep… it should work

how can i display post with 25 words only in my home page, as i want to show the full post text on other page with read more button???
please guide…