Words collection is empty in Story with ONLY Tables in separate Paragraphs...

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Looks like a bug to me?

Words collection for a Story - or Paragraph - that has ONLY Tables - is empty...

[Peter Kahrel]

Well, depends on how you look at it. From InDesign's perspective it's consistent. A table sits in a placeholder that's dubbed Character, but it's not a character in the sense of a glyph. When you (grep) search . (any character( you won't find anything.

The same goes for embedded frames, you get the same results.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

But "it occupies some space" in the collection of characters? And even one letter words are words?

[m1b]

Conceptually a word is not a "building block" in the same way that character is. If I was writing a word-parser I probably would opt to to treat non-glyph characters as word boundary markers, ie. not part of a word. So my parser would return zero too. 
- Mark

[rob day]

Hi @Robert at ID-Tasker , Look at table properties—there is the storyOffset, which is the insertionPoint I think @Peter Kahrel  is referring to.

https://www.indesignjs.de/extendscriptAPI/indesign-latest/#Table.html

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@rob day

Yes, I know. 

But you can't use StoryOffset to get a reference of the Table - even when documentation says that InsertionPoint has a Tables collection - it return "0": (*)

So you would need to get Index of the InsertionPoint then get a reference to the Character in the same Story - then you can get the Table.

And myTable.parent returns TextFrame... which is crazy on its own...

But if you add a letter(s) before and after - then you get a Word:

(*) don't have time to check, but I'm pretty sure, all other collections also will be empty - someone just based InsertionPoint on the Text:

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

But that's nothing - I've just finished adding some math functions:

So now it's possible to reformat values - in tables or in text - and then re-calculate and update totals.

[rob day]

Words collection for a Story - or Paragraph - that has ONLY Tables - is empty...

The word collection for a story with multiple returns or white spaces also empty.

var i = app.activeDocument.stories.everyItem().insertionPoints.everyItem().getElements();
$.writeln(i.length)
//returns 15

var w = app.activeDocument.stories.everyItem().words.everyItem().getElements();
$.writeln(w.length)
//returns 0

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@rob day

Yes, words are build from letters, so empty paragraph or space won't return words.