mjhjmtu

There are plenty of ways to count lines, words, and characters in Emacs. For instance, invoking M-= (AKA count-words-region) does that very thing on a given region. However, I am having trouble finding a way to do this for paragraphs. By paragraph, I mean the same pattern that is used for forward-paragraph and backward-paragraph. I see no easy or straightforward way to count the number of paragraphs in a region or buffer without using regexps or similar. I'm sure that I'm not the first person to face this problem, so I must be missing something. If someone could provide an easy, straightforward way to count the paragraphs in a region or buffer, I would be glad.

Here is how the builtin count-lines works:

(- (buffer-size) (forward-line (buffer-size)))

The following changes forward-line to forward-paragraph to implement the function.

(defun count-paragraphs (start end)
 "Return number of paragraphs between START and END."
 (save-excursion
 (save-restriction
 (narrow-to-region start end)
 (goto-char (point-min))
 (- (buffer-size) (forward-paragraph (buffer-size))))))

(defun count-paragraphs-region-or-buffer ()
 "Report number of paragraphs in the region (if it's active) or the entire buffer."
 (declare (interactive-only count-paragraphs))
 (interactive)
 (let ((paragraphs (if (use-region-p)
 (count-paragraphs (region-beginning) (region-end))
 (count-paragraphs (point-min) (point-max)))))
 (message "%s has %d paragraph%s"
 (if (use-region-p) "Region" "Buffer")
 paragraphs
 (if (> paragraphs 1) "s" ""))))

Does this do the right thing?

(count-matches paragraph-start)