Can I tell TeXcount to not count underscores as word separators?

Question

I am trying to count words in a document that contains various C types such as \texttt{uintptr\_t}, \texttt{size\_t}, etc. However, when I use texcount it breaks at the underscore and these as two words.

Is there a way to tell texcount to treat words with underscores as being only one word?

If I run texcount on this file it reports 5 words:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Word with underscore: \texttt{uintptr\_t}.
\end{document}

How can I work around this and count uintptr\_t as one word?

edit: I've tried the following which mostly works:

\documentclass{article}
%TC:newcounter icode Number of words in code
%TC:newcounter icodeuses Number of code uses
%TC:macrocount \code [icodeuses]
%TC:macro \code [icode]
\newcommand*{\code}[1]{\texttt{#1}}
\begin{document}
Word with underscore: \code{uintptr\_t}.
\end{document}

This now reports the following for texcount -sum:

Sum count: 6
Words in text: 3
Words in headers: 0
Words outside text (captions, etc.): 0
Number of headers: 0
Number of floats/tables/figures: 0
Number of math inlines: 0
Number of math displayed: 0
Number of words in code: 2
Number of code uses: 1

Can I exclude certain counters from the total sum?

Answer 1

There's no simple way to do this with a command line option, but it's easy to add \_ to the list of character modifiers.

Make a copy of texcount.pl and place it somewhere where it will be found (your local ~/bin folder is an obvious choice). It's probably best to give it a different name so as not to override the standard one. (This assumes Mac/Linux; I don't have any idea about how to do this in Windows.)

On line 494 you should find the following line:

my $modifiedchars='\\\\[\'\"\`\~\^\=](@|\{@\})';

Change this to:

my $modifiedchars='\\\\[\'\"\`\~\^\=\_](@|\{@\})';

This will now include \_ as character modifier.

Now running this modified file with your example yields:

$ ./texcount-new.pl  -sum word-count-underscore.tex
File: word-count-underscore.tex
Encoding: ascii
Sum count: 5
Words in text: 3
Words in headers: 0
Words outside text (captions, etc.): 0
Number of headers: 0
Number of floats/tables/figures: 0
Number of math inlines: 0
Number of math displayed: 0
Number of words in code: 1
Number of code uses: 1