Ever need to get word counts for a directory of PDFs, using nothing but R? Have I got a solution for you!

count words in PDFs.R

library(pdftools)
# finds files in current directory
pdfs <- list.files(pattern = "pdf",  full.names = TRUE)

# uses pdftools to convert pdfs to plain-text, replaces line breaks with spaces
  # and then counts the words, ignoring non-word symbols
readCleanCount<-function(pdf){
	txt<-pdf_text(pdf)
	txt<-paste(gsub(txt,pattern="\r\n",replace=" "),collapse=" ")
  # regex stolen from StackOverFlow, like 99% of all regex
  # https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8920145/count-the-number-of-words-in-a-string-in-r
	count<-sapply(gregexpr("[[:alpha:]]+", txt), function(x) sum(x > 0))
	return(count)
	}


cbind(pdfs,sapply(pdfs, readCleanCount))

You can use DocuCount by Tradutema (https://tradutema.com/docucount-by-tradutema/) to get number of words straightaway in just 3 seconds from a list of files (images, pdf, locked pdf, protected pdf, Docx…), even handwritten text. You will get a log including number of words per file, number of pages, totals etc that you can copy paste in Excel . It’s free. It’s incredibily fast because it uses Artificial Intelligence, instead of OCR conversion function.