text-statistics

Comprehensive text statistics: word, sentence, and character counts, average word length, average sentence length, estimated reading time, and a lexile-like difficulty estimate — pure Rust, zero dependencies, deterministic.

These are the same measurements the BeLikeNative AI writing assistant surfaces while you write, packaged as a small, embeddable library you can drop into editors, CLIs, static-site generators, or build pipelines.

Why

Word counts, sentence counts, and reading-time estimates are the backbone of nearly every writing tool. The math is small and public — there is no reason to shell out to a paid API or pull in a heavy NLP dependency just to get them. This crate does the whole job in a single dependency-free file and adds a calibrated, lexile-like difficulty score on top.

Install

[dependencies]
text-statistics = "0.1"

Quick start

use text_statistics::{stats, Difficulty};

let s = stats("The cat sat on the mat. It was a good day for a nap.");
assert_eq!(s.words, 14);
assert_eq!(s.sentences, 2);
assert_eq!(s.difficulty_band(), Difficulty::Easy);
println!("~{} min read", s.estimated_reading_minutes);

What you get

stats(&str) returns a TextStats with:

field	meaning
`words`	word-token count (contractions count as one)
`sentences`	sentence-ending units (`. ! ?`)
`characters`	total Unicode scalars
`characters_no_spaces`	total scalars minus whitespace
`avg_word_length`	mean letters per word (digits excluded)
`avg_sentence_length`	mean words per sentence
`estimated_reading_seconds`	reading time at 200 wpm (min 1s for non-empty text)
`estimated_reading_minutes`	ceiling of the above, min 1 for non-empty text
`difficulty_score`	0–100 lexile-like blend of word/sentence length

difficulty_band() maps the score to Easy / Medium / Hard.

Tuning

Reading speed, the easy/hard word-length thresholds, and the hard sentence-length threshold are all pub const. Re-export them or copy the stats function to recalibrate for your corpus.

Determinism

The same input always yields the same output — there is no randomness, no network, and no global state. Safe to call from multiple threads.

License

MIT. Built for BeLikeNative.

text-statistics 0.1.0