Read time

📚 Medium's like reading time estimation, based on Medium's read time formula.

Sites like Medium.com have popularized the concept of giving users an estimate for the amount of time it will take them to read the content. With this convenience in mind, ReadTime gives PHP developers the same tool for their readable content. It's a simple feature that will give a nice touch to your PHP application.

Features

• Calculates read time of images in decreasing progression (Example - 12 seconds for the first image, 11 for the second, until images counted at 3 seconds).
• Calculates read time of the Chinese / Japanese / Korean characters separately.
• Removes unwanted html tags to calculate read time more efficiently.

Reference

• help.medium.com/articles/Read-time
• medium.com/blogging-guide/how-is-medium-article-read-time-calculated

Installation

You can install the package via composer:

composer require realodix/readtime

Quick start

Here is an example of the most basic usage:

<?php

use Realodix\ReadTime\ReadTime;

$readTime = new ReadTime('foo bar');

echo $readTime->get();
// less than a minute

You may also pass several arguments to the constructor if you wish to change settings on the fly:

/**
 * @param string|array $content   The content to analyze
 * @param int          $wpm       Speed of reading the text in Words per Minute
 * @param int          $imageTime Speed of reading the image in seconds
 * @param int          $cpm       Speed of reading the Chinese / Korean / Japanese
 *                                characters in Characters per Minute
 */

$readTime = new ReadTime($content, $wpm = 265, $imageTime = 12, $cpm = 500);

echo $readTime->get();

The ReadTime class is able to accept a string of content or a array (flat or multidimensional) of multiple pieces of content. This may come in handy if you are attempting to display the total read time of body content along with sidebar content.

For example:

$readTime = new ReadTime([$content, $moreContent, $evenMoreContent]);

echo $readTime->get();

❗ Named arguments are not covered by Realodix Readtime backwards compatibility guidelines. We may choose to rename function arguments when necessary in order to improve codebase. Therefore, using named arguments when calling methods should be done cautiously and with the understanding that the parameter names may change in the future.

Methods

get()

Retrieve the read time.

setTranslation(array $translations)

Manually set the translation text for the class to use. If no key is passed it will default to the English counterpart. A complete translation array will contain the following:

[
    'less_than' => 'less than a minute',
    'one_min'   => '1 min read',
    'more_than' => 'min read',
];

toArray()

Get the contents and settings of the class as an array.

toJson()

Get the contents and settings of the class as a JSON string.

[
    'duration'        => '6 min read',
    'actual_duration' => 5.55,
    'total_words'     => 1325,
    'total_words_cjk' => 0,
    'total_images'    => 3,
    'word_time'       => 5.660,
    'word_time_cjk'   => 0,
    'image_time'      => 0.55,
];

Variable	Description
duration	Humanized actualDuration for the input
actual_duration	Actual duration of the input (in minutes)
total_words	Number of words in the input
total_words_cjk	Chinese / Japanese / Korean language characters count
total_images	Number of images in input
word_time	Read time of the words in the input (in minutes)
word_time_cjk	Read time of the Chinese / Japanese / Korean in the input (in minutes)
image_time	Read time of the images in the input (in minutes)

Contributing

Thank you for your interest in ReadTime. Please check out our contributing guide.

License

This package is licensed using the MIT License.