read-time-estimator

A simple, dependency-free utility to estimate reading time of text, Markdown, or HTML content. Perfect for blog posts, news portals, and documentation pages.

Installation

npm install read-time-estimator

Features

• 🚀 Zero dependencies — extremely fast and lightweight.
• 🧹 Smart Parsing — automatically strips HTML tags and Markdown formatting to compute an accurate word count.
• ⚙️ Customizable WPM — adjust the Words-Per-Minute reading speed.
• 📦 Simple Output — returns total words, precise decimal read time, and a user-friendly formatted string (e.g. "3 min read").

Usage

const { estimateReadTime } = require('read-time-estimator');

const blogPost = `
# Welcome to my Awesome Blog!

Today we are going to learn how to build npm packages.
Check out this link: [npm documentation](https://npmjs.com).

Here is some sample code:
\`\`\`javascript
console.log("Hello, World!");
\`\`\`

Hope you found this article helpful!
`;

const result = estimateReadTime(blogPost);

console.log(result);
/* Output:
{
  words: 25,
  time: 0.125,
  timeFormatted: '1 min read'
}
*/

Options

estimateReadTime(content, options) accepts the following options:

| Option | Type | Default | Description | |---|---|---|---| | wpm | number | 200 | Words per minute used for calculation (typical adult is 200-250 WPM). | | stripHtml | boolean | true | Strip HTML tags prior to calculating word counts. | | stripMarkdown | boolean | true | Strip Markdown formatting characters prior to counting. |

// Example with custom speed and HTML stripping disabled
const htmlText = "<p>This is a custom HTML string.</p>";
const result = estimateReadTime(htmlText, {
  wpm: 100, // slower reading speed
  stripHtml: false
});

License

MIT