GreaseMonkey Script To Sum Selected Numbers In A Web Page

(Originally posted 2014-12-13.)

This post is meant to inspire people who like programming the web to do simple tasks. It contains a sample Firefox GreaseMonkey [1] script, which I hope you will find useful. [2]

Suppose you are looking at a web page, perhaps one with a table in, and you want to add up some numbers you see there. Perhaps they’re in a column in that table.

With this script you select the numbers you’re interested it and push the “Sum Up” button that appears at the top.

Here’s the script:

    // ==UserScript==
    // @name        swipeCalc
    // @namespace   MGLP
    // @description Does calculations on selected text
    // @version     0.0
    // ==/UserScript==

    input=document.createElement("input")
    input.type="button";
    input.value="Sum Up";
    input.onclick = showResult;
    document.body.insertBefore(input,document.body.firstChild)

    function showResult()
    {
      // Get array of space- and range-separated tokens
        selection=window.getSelection()
        var tokens=[]
        for(r=0;r<selection.rangeCount;r++){
            rangeTokens=selection.getRangeAt(r).toString().split(" ")
            for(t=0;t<rangeTokens.length;t++){
                tokens.push(rangeTokens[t])
            }
        }

        // Sum up any detected number values
        tally=0
        count=0
        maximum=Math.max()
        minimum=Math.min()
        for(t=0;t<tokens.length;t++){
            tokenValue=parseFloat(tokens[t])
            if(!isNaN(tokenValue)){
                tally+=tokenValue
                count++
                maximum=Math.max(maximum,tokenValue)
                minimum=Math.min(minimum,tokenValue)
            }
        }
        alert("Sum: "+tally+" Average: "+tally/count+" Minimum: "+minimum+" Maximum: "+maximum)
    }

Everything up to the function definition is code to insert a button at the top of every page, with the words “Sum Up” on it. [3] When you push the button it invokes the function “showResult”

Most of the code is the function “showResult”, which is actually quite simple:

• First we break up the (perhaps disjoint) selected text into words.
• Then we loop through all the tokens, using parseFloat() to turn them into floating-point numbers. [4]

• For each valid floating point we use it to contribute to the sum, average, maximum and minimum tallies.
• We display in an alert the statistics we’ve computed.

I hope this script doesn’t look intimidating. Personally I intend to build on it – as there’s so much more we can do with GreaseMonkey.

When I wrote about GreaseMonkey in 2005 I didn’t then realise I’d be using it to prototype Firefox Extensions. I just might do that here. But, of course, time is fleeting and there are lots of challenges out there, with more appearing (it seems) every day.