如何创建一个 Django model function 来返回博客帖子的读取时间，如果正文有 ZFC365FDC70D5267D

Question

I'm creating a Django Blog, and I saw the feature of average read time in blogs like medium or dev.to and I ask myself how can implement it.

blog/models.py:

class Post(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    author = models.ForeignKey(settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    header_image = models.ImageField(blank=True, null=True, upload_to="images/post_header/")
    date = models.DateField(auto_now_add=True) 
    description = models.TextField(blank=True, null=True)
    category = models.ForeignKey(Category, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    # body = models.TextField()
    body = RichTextField()
    upvotes = models.ManyToManyField(settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL, related_name="post_votes")
    
    def total_likes(self):
        """
        Returns total likes in the page
        """
        return self.upvotes.count()

    def __str__(self):
        """
        Show the title and the author in the admin Page
        """
        return self.title + " by " + str(self.author)
    
    def get_time_read(self):
        return "Some tricky code to get the body of the post and return the words stripping the 
                                                                                           tags"



    def get_absolute_url(self):
        return reverse("blog:article_page", kwargs={"pk": self.pk})

I think that the easiest way is to implement a function in the Post model, that returns the read time of an average adult person, by counting the total words and dividing it by the average words per minute (aprox 200 w/m), and after that pass the function to the html template and render the time read.

That would be easy of implement, If there weren't html tags in the blog Post body, since I use a Rich Text Editor (django-ckeditor) in the form to write it.

So how can I get the content of the blog post body and how can I strip the tags to get the total words?

Answer 1

One way would be to use a library such as beautiful soup to parse your html. Then you can just count the words:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

WORDS_PER_MINUTE = 100

class Post(models.Model):
    ...
    def get_reading_time(self):
        soup = BeautifulSoup(self.body, 'html.parser')
        text = soup.get_text()
        word_count = len(text.split())
        read_time = word_count / WORDS_PER_MINUTE
        return read_time

For what it's worth. This isn't necessarily how I would do this:

Imagine you're writing a blog about how to use django. You'll have sections in there which are code. How long does it take you to read code? It depends on the code and how long you have to think about it. Likewise for any subject, some blogs just take longer to read irrespective of word-count.

One way might be just to add read time as a required field, and ask the blog-post author to provide an estimated read time. There are of course disadvantages with that approach too though. If you have lots of authors, with different reading speeds you'll have inconsistent estimates across your site.

Something to think about...