Free Text Tools Every Writer Needs (Word Counter, Case Converter & More)

Word Count and Reading Time

A word counter should give you more than a single number. The useful metrics for writing are:

• Word count: split on whitespace, handle multi-word hyphenated terms correctly
• Character count (with spaces): relevant for character-limited platforms (Twitter, meta descriptions)
• Character count (without spaces): relevant for SMS (160 characters per SMS segment)
• Reading time: based on 200–240 words per minute (typical adult reading speed)
• Speaking time: based on 130 words per minute (typical speech rate)
• Sentence count and average sentence length: readability indicators

// Text analysis in JavaScript
function analyzeText(text: string) {
  // Normalise whitespace
  const cleaned = text.trim().replace(/s+/g, ' ');

  const words = cleaned.split(/s+/).filter(w => w.length > 0);
  const sentences = cleaned.split(/[.!?]+/).filter(s => s.trim().length > 0);
  const chars = cleaned.length;
  const charsNoSpaces = cleaned.replace(/s/g, '').length;

  return {
    wordCount: words.length,
    charCount: chars,
    charCountNoSpaces: charsNoSpaces,
    sentenceCount: sentences.length,
    avgWordsPerSentence: Math.round(words.length / sentences.length),
    readingTime: Math.ceil(words.length / 220),    // minutes at 220 wpm
    speakingTime: Math.ceil(words.length / 130),   // minutes at 130 wpm
  };
}

Case Conversion

The cases that actually come up in real work:

const text = "the quick BROWN fox jumps over the lazy dog";

// Common case conversions
const uppercase = text.toUpperCase();
// → "THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG"

const lowercase = text.toLowerCase();
// → "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"

const titleCase = text.replace(/w/g, c => c.toUpperCase());
// → "The Quick BROWN Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog"
// (Note: doesn't fix existing uppercase — see sentenceCase)

const sentenceCase = text.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + text.slice(1).toLowerCase();
// → "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"

// camelCase — for variable names
const camelCase = text
  .split(/s+/)
  .map((word, i) => i === 0 ? word.toLowerCase() : word.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + word.slice(1).toLowerCase())
  .join('');
// → "theQuickBrownFoxJumpsOverTheLazyDog"

// kebab-case — for CSS classes, URL slugs
const kebabCase = text.toLowerCase().replace(/s+/g, '-');
// → "the-quick-brown-fox-jumps-over-the-lazy-dog"

// snake_case — for database columns, Python variables
const snakeCase = text.toLowerCase().replace(/s+/g, '_');
// → "the_quick_brown_fox_jumps_over_the_lazy_dog"

Text Cleaning: Removing Hidden Junk

This is the unglamorous category of text tools that saves the most time in practice. When you copy text from a browser, PDF, or Word document, you often get invisible characters:

// Common hidden characters that break layouts and templates
// (Use charCodeAt() to detect them in JavaScript)

// Non-breaking space (U+00A0) — looks like a space, breaks word-wrap differently
' '.charCodeAt(0); // → 160 (not 32 like a regular space)

// Zero-width space (U+200B) — invisible, breaks string matching
'​'.charCodeAt(0); // → 8203

// Smart quotes — look like quotes, break code and JSON
'‘' // Left single quote '
'’' // Right single quote '
'“' // Left double quote "
'”' // Right double quote "

// Em dash (U+2014) vs hyphen (U+002D) — breaks regex patterns
'—' // Em dash —
'-' // Hyphen -

// Clean all of these in one pass:
function cleanText(text: string): string {
  return text
    .replace(/ /g, ' ')           // NBSP → space
    .replace(/​/g, '')            // Zero-width space → remove
    .replace(/[‘’]/g, "'")   // Smart quotes → straight
    .replace(/[“”]/g, '"')   // Smart double quotes → straight
    .replace(/—/g, '--')          // Em dash → double hyphen
    .replace(/
/g, '
')            // Windows line endings → Unix
    .replace(/
/g, '
')              // Old Mac line endings → Unix
    .replace(/
{3,}/g, '

')        // Multiple blank lines → max 1
    .trim();
}

Markdown to HTML Conversion

For writers who work in Markdown but need HTML output (for CMSes, email clients, or documentation systems), a local markdown converter is useful. The two most common JavaScript Markdown parsers:

• marked: Fast, small (10KB), supports GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM)
• markdown-it: More extensible, good plugin ecosystem, supports tables and footnotes

import { marked } from 'marked';

const markdown = `
# Article Title

This is a **bold** statement with *italic* emphasis.

- Item one
- Item two
- Item three

\`\`\`javascript
const x = 42;
\`\`\`
`;

// Convert to HTML
const html = marked.parse(markdown);
// → <h1>Article Title</h1><p>This is a <strong>bold</strong>...</p>

// For safe rendering in browser (sanitise to prevent XSS)
import DOMPurify from 'dompurify';
document.getElementById('output').innerHTML = DOMPurify.sanitize(html);

For developers working with structured data rather than prose, our JSON data tools guide covers formatting, querying, and transforming JSON — the structured text equivalent of these prose utilities.