word-freq-list

word-freq-list is a Node.js command-line tool that helps you quickly analyze the word frequency in a text file. Designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind, word-freq-list can count the occurrences of each word or focus on a specific word of interest. This tool provides an example of Node.js file handling and string manipulation and is useful for anyone working with text analysis, data processing, or learning Node.js.

Features

• Count All Words: Calculate the frequency of every unique word in a file.
• Targeted Word Count: Specify a word to get its count, ignoring all other words.
• Case Insensitive: Counts words in a case-insensitive manner to ensure accurate results.
• Easy to Use: Simple CLI tool that can be installed and run in seconds.

Installation

To use word-freq-list, you have two options: using npx directly, or installing it globally.

Option 1: Run with npx

npx word-freq-list <filename> [targetWord]

Option 2: Install Globally

• Install it globally to use as a regular command:

npm install -g word-freq-list

• Then you can run:

word-freq-list <filename> [targetWord]

Usage

• The command-line tool expects a file path and, optionally, a word to look for:

word-freq-list <filename> [targetWord]

• filename : (Required) Path to the text file you want to analyze.
• targetWord: (Optional) Specify a word to count its occurrences. If omitted, word-freq-list will display a frequency map of all words in the file.

Examples

• Example 1: Count All Words
• Count all words in a text file called sample.txt:

npx word-freq-list sample.txt

• Output

{
  "node": 3,
  "javascript": 5,
  "cli": 2,
  "tool": 4
}

• Example 2: Count a Specific Word
• To count how many times the word "javascript" appears in sample.txt:

npx word-freq-list sample.txt example

• Output

{
  "example": 7
}

How It Works

1. The tool reads the file provided in the arguments using Node.js’s fs/promises module.

2. It splits the text into words based on non-word characters, making it easy to handle punctuation.

3. If a targetWord is provided, it counts only that word (case insensitive). Otherwise, it returns a frequency count of each unique word in the file.

Contributing

• Contributions are welcome! If you have ideas for improving this tool, feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.

Be sure to name the file `README.md` and place it in your project root folder for the formatting to be rendered correctly. GitHub and most Markdown editors should automatically recognize and display the formatting once it’s in a `.md` file.