I recently needed a quick way to count the words in selected text on a web page. It seemed like an OS X service would be the perfect ticket, moreso since Snow Leopard shows in the Services menu only those services appropriate for the current context.

Smarter people have tackled this need before, but none of their solutions seemed to work for me, ironically, in Snow Leopard. I suspect that either something changed ever so slightly in AppleScript, or that those scripts were designed to work with a specific utility (ThisService - which by the way it seemed pretty awesome) rather than standalone.

Either way, here’s my solution:

on run {input, parameters}
  display alert "Counted " & (count words of (input as string)) & ¬
    " words." message "The selected text had " & (count characters of (input as string)) & " characters."
  return input
end run

Here’s a screenshot of it counting the words of this post (how self-referential):

Two quick notes: both John Gruber’s and Nima Yousefi’s scripts use on process(_str) - I had no luck getting that to work and instead I’ve decided to go with Automator’s suggestion of on run {input, parameters}. As a result of my choice, it seems I was also required to cast the input to a string ((input as string)), otherwise count words of would consistently and unwantedly return 0.