Word count not recognized as integer variable

Question

ok, i have this command:
set mywordcount to do shell script "wc -l < MyFile.txt"
which gives me the number of words of a given txt
with display alert it reports me number 1 when there is one word, number 4 if there are 4 words, etc...
the problem comes when i want to do one action if the file has 1 word, another if it has more than 1...
when i write:
if mywordcount = 1 then
myactions here
else
otheractions here
end if
it doesn't do anything at all...
any ideas?
thanks!

Answer 1

the way to do this in applescript is as follows:
set contentsText to read "/path/to/file.txt"
set mywordcount to count of words of contentText
that will return an integer value.  if you want to use the do shell script approach, keep in mind that dss always returns text, so you'll want to coerce the text value to an integer:
set mywordcount to (do shell script "wc -l < MyFile.txt") as integer