The new update for Hanzi Counter, which should be available after a week from now, will let you export your results via E-Mail to a comma delimitated text file that most spreadsheet programs can read. It works on Numbers on my iPad at the very least.
The main improvement is the ability to exclude characters from your search results. The great thing about this is you can take a list of all the characters you know and exclude them from the parsing of a body of text. The results would then only show you characters you don't know. This is super useful for identify new characters to learn and putting them into a flashcard program.
Even though I don't like making things easy, I've made it easy for Chinese learners that are into the HSK tests. You can select to filter out characters that are required for each level of the HSK tests. It's complete as far as I can tell, as long as I haven't messed up somewhere. You can also phase out the English alphabet, so if whatever you are reading has lots of English words in it, they will no longer affect you results.
One limitation is that if you use traditional characters, they will slip through the net and appear in your results, unless you painstakingly put them into the custom list. For me, I can read both forms and my Cantonese is so basic that the pain of fixing this problem is a lot more than the pain of living with it. If you want to fix it then let me know, I'll let you know what I require and put it into the next update and credit you here and on the App Store page (if you so wish).
The custom list is what ever you type into the big white text view near the bottom of the view. If you press the blue downward arrow next to any of the preset lists, it will dump those characters into the custom list so you can edit them. Whatever you type in there and whatever you set the switches to is saved and automatically used when you restart the program. This means if you have a list of characters that you've mastered and are slowly adding to over time it will be kept for you every time you use Hanzi Counter.
I've also put progress bars into the program so that you can see it processing your data. Before, if you had a lot of text the app would just freeze and get back to you when it was done. Now you get some feedback. It turns out, however, that the most intensive operation is updating the table that shows your results. But I can't link that process with a progress bar, or maybe I can, but I couldn't figure it out. So it's not perfect but hang in there, your data is coming! I think I've got all the mad stuff that caused it to crash out of there, if not let me know. Thats it! I'll let you know when this update is available!
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