Piwik Pro Variable that counts words in <p>

Question

So I'm trying to make a variable in Piwik Pro that counts words in all pages on my website withing a

and gives me back a plain number. So far I came up with this but debug mode gives me an undefined in return.

function getWordCounts(nodeList) {     
  var wordCount = 0;     
  var totalWords = getWordCounts(document.querySelectorAll('p'));     
    for ( var i = 0; i < nodeList.length; i++ ) {         
      wordCount += nodeList[i].textContent.trim().split(' ').length;     
    }     
  return totalWords; 
}

Tried using debug mode tested the tag without a function but with a simple number this worked. But cannot get the number to be the actual words in the

Answer 1

Just stumbled on your question here, was googling for something else actually.

Interesting enough! I've learned that google displays your question with escaped <p></p>-tags. SO did not!
Meaning, that finding your answer on SO is going to confuse the reader to think that you are trying to find <a>-tags. So when you write HTML in SO, make sure you escape it so you can get a relevant answer to your question.
Hmm, You learn something new everyday!

Anyhow, I took the time to read through your question and I came up with this solution:

  /**
   * Get wordcount within p tags
   */
  function getWordCount(){
    var p = document.getElementsByTagName('p');
    var wordCount = 0;
    for(var i = 0; i < p.length; i++){
      wordCount += p[i].innerHTML.split(' ').length;
    }
    return wordCount;
  }

However! I'm not sure how performant that piece of code would be, or how much content you have on your sites. Which could impact on user experience.
Just saying.

Because if you are using PiwikPRO or Matomo, or any other analytics tool for that matter, your job is to improve the site and not make it worse, this probably goes without saying.
But it makes me wonder, what is the use case of analyzing words per page? Is it to scrape information to learn if a page has enough content, for SEO purposes of course. But I think there is plenty of other tools for that kind of analysis, that doesn't impact on the user experience.
Me myself, I use Screaming Frog e.g. and it covers most of my needs with the free version. I have no idea if Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs have free variants, but if you work at a tech company, someone probably have a license.
I'm just saying this because if you load in the script from Piwik, it would run that piece of code every time a user enters a page, but the content is not likely going to change that often(I could be wrong).

I would however recommend to load it in asynchronously which you probably already are.

I would even suggest that you should doublecheck on heavy sites to run a quick test, like so:

  /**
   * Get word count within p tags
   */
  function getWordCount(){
    var p = document.getElementsByTagName('p');
    var wordCount = 0;
    for(var i = 0; i < p.length; i++){
      wordCount += p[i].innerHTML.split(' ').length;
    }
    console.log(wordCount);
    return wordCount;
  }

  /**
   * Check performance of a function
   */
  function checkPerformance(runFunction){
    var start = performance.now();
    runFunction();
    var end = performance.now();
    var time = end - start;
    console.log('This code took ' + time + ' milliseconds.');
  }
  checkPerformance(getWordCount);