Estimated Reading Time for Blog Posts, Articles, etc.

A simple Kotlin/Java implementation of Medium's Read Time calculation.

Examples (TL;DR)

import net.thauvin.erik.readingtime.ReadingTime

// ...

val rt = ReadingTime(htmlText)
println(rt.calcEstimatedReadTime()) // eg: 2 min read

To get the estimated reading time in seconds use the calcReadingTimeInSec() function.

• View Kotlin or Java Examples.

Properties

The following properties are available:

ReadingTime(
    text = "sometext",
    wpm = 275,
    postfix = "min read",
    plural = "min read",
    excludeImages = false
)

Property	Description
text	The text to be evaluated.
wpm	The words per minute reading average.
postfix	The value to be appended to the reading time.
plural	The value to be appended if the reading time is more than 1 minute.
excludeImages	Images are excluded from the reading time when set.

Functions

A couple of useful functions are also available:

ReadingTime.wordCount(htmlText) // Returns the count of words. (HTML stripped)
ReadingTime.imgCount(htmlText) // Returns the count of images. (HTML img tags)

JSP

A JSP tag is also available for easy incorporation into web applications:

<%@taglib uri="https://erik.thauvin.net/taglibs/readingtime" prefix="t"%>
<t:readingtime
    postfix="min read"
    plural="min read"
    excludeImages="false"
    wpm="275">some_text_or_html</t:readingtime>

None of the attributes are required.

Just drop the jar into your WEB-INF/lib directory.

Gradle

To use with Gradle, include the following dependency in your build file:

repositories {
    jcenter()
}

dependencies {
    implementation("net.thauvin.erik:readingtime:0.9.0")
}