readtime

A lightweight, Medium-style reading-time estimator for plain text and HTML article fragments.

Installation

npm install @jojoee/readtime

Usage

ESM / TypeScript

import { readtime } from '@jojoee/readtime'

readtime('A short article') // 1
readtime('<p>An HTML article</p>') // 1

CommonJS

const { readtime } = require('@jojoee/readtime')

readtime('A short article') // 1

Browser

<script src="https://unpkg.com/@jojoee/readtime/dist/readtime.umd.js"></script>
<script>
  readtime.readtime('<p>An HTML article</p>') // 1
</script>

Demo

Open demo/index.html in a modern browser to try raw text and HTML fragments with the published @jojoee/[email protected] bundle.

API

readtime(input: string): number

Returns an article's estimated reading time in whole minutes. The estimate uses 200 words per minute and rounds non-empty content up to the next minute.

readtime('') // 0
readtime('One word') // 1
readtime('...200 words...') // 1
readtime('...201 words...') // 2

input may be plain text or an HTML fragment. HTML is parsed before counting: tags and comments are ignored, entities are decoded, and script, style, template, and noscript content is excluded. Word counting uses Unicode word segmentation, which handles multilingual article text better than whitespace splitting.

Limitations

• Pass the article fragment itself. readtime does not identify the main article in a complete web page or exclude navigation, ads, and related content.
• Image, video, and code-block reading time are not weighted separately.
• The reading speed is fixed at 200 words per minute; the library intentionally provides no configuration or display-label formatter.

Development

npm install
npm run lint
npx tsc --noEmit
npm test
npm run test:coverage
npm run build