Hermetic Word Frequency Counter Advanced 33.0

Overview

It’s not easy to work with big text files, especially when your tasks need you to gather technical details regarding their content. Hermetic Word Frequency Counter Advanced is a tool that counts the frequency of occurrence of all phrases and words which occur at least twice in one or more given texts, with many features available; for example you can see the frequency of all words in the text but ignore or include numerals, symbols or common words (such as “a”, “the”, etc.).

Installation

The installation procedure for the product is quite simple. Make sure you are logged in as an Administrator and run the installer to begin. The setup wizard will then guide you through the process, which only has a few series of steps and doesn't last long. The software is clean from malware and additional 3^rd party software so you’re safe from that aspect.

WFCA works under Win98, Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7 and 8.

Interface

The main window of the program is not eye-popping, but this way the user won’t have a hard time getting familiar with it. There are three methods which you can use to scan text: Clipboard, Single File and Folder. These options are located on the left side of the window. Choose "Clipboard" and then copy any text from an external editor. Selecting the “Folder” option will make the window a bit richer, since it will make a few more settings available (e.g. include subfolders, file extensions to be included/excluded, list of files to be scanned and others). As for the “Single File” option there aren't many settings, just pick the file you want to scan and that’s it.

The results are displayed on the big textbox on the center of the window.

If you want to save the results to an output file, then the "Output file" button should be used to specify an output file before any files are scanned. There is a checkbox to enable or disable output to a selected output file.

Pros

All sorts of files can be scanned, as long as they contain only text. The rule here is that the input file cannot include any bytes with ASCII values less than 32, except for 9 (tab), 10 (line-feed) and 13 (carriage-return). So you can scan TXT files or HTML files or files of any other type without trouble if they consist of text only. If they don’t, you’ll get an error message with some information on the matter.

Apart from words, you can count all repeating phrases as well. In this case, before the scan is initiated you will be prompted to define the minimum and maximum number of words in phrase, plus the minimum number of occurrences. The minimum number must be 2 or greater.

In addition, common words and other trivial items like numerals, colons, periods, commas, apostrophes etc. can be excluded. A dictionary with common words is included in the setup package, but you can edit it or select another one. You can change those settings in the settings menu.

You can sort the results in alphabetical or reverse alphabetical order, as well as by rank or by frequency.

Cons

This is not a big con, but it should be noted that there is a limit on the number of characters that can be displayed on either of the textboxes. The limit is 60,000 characters which is translated into about 1000-2000 words on a normal text file. Author's note: "This does not limit the operation of the program, since, if an output file has been specified (required for large input files) then output to the file will continue even if the textbox fills up."

Alternatives

There are free, online tools such as Word Frequency Counter or Online Word Counter that do the same job as WFCA, although they have significantly fewer features when compared to it. Another software with more features but still weaker against WFCA is Word Frequency Count In Multiple Text & HTML Files Software (paid).

Conclusion

Word Frequency Counter Advanced is a handy tool that can do the job you probably can’t, especially when it comes to bigger files. It is not only powerful and easy to use, but stable too. It deserves 5 stars without doubt.