Analyse characters instead of words

Analyse characters instead of words

Almost everything in Concordance is based on analysing words. You can, however, tell it to analyse letters (characters) instead of words. To do this, go to the Text menu, choose Special, then choose Analyse characters instead of words.

This causes the program to treat every letter as if it were a complete word in itself. This effectively produces a frequency count of the characters in your text, like this:

A 1440
B 289
C 407
D 832
E 2267

and so on.

Note that if you have also chosen Contexts of Selected Length -- say 3 words of context before and after every headword -- then you will get 3 letters of context instead of 3 words. (Choosing actual-line contexts will still show the whole line of context.)

Analysing letters instead of words is a special ability which breaks Concordance's 'rule' of being word-based, and you will find aspects of the program which do not make very good sense when you do so. One or two are specifically disallowed: if you make a Fast Concordance which picks words using Regular Expressions or Phrases, the option to analyse characters instead of words is ignored.

Warning: if you combine this option with Show duplicate words separately, you will get a separate entry in the Wordlist for every character in your text! This will quickly produce so many entries that your patience will be exhausted and your computer's memory probably overwhelmed. The program will warn you before you try to make a concordance which combines these options.