Word count

This sentence has a certain number of words. But how many? With a Go method, we can count sequences of non-whitespace characters—these are words.

With a word count method, we can generate statistics about text. We can verify that it is correct. A regexp can be used for the most accurate word counting.

Example func

To write a simple word count func in Go, we can use regexp. Think of a series of words—the one thing we can do to detect a word is find a sequence of letters or digits.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "regexp"
)

func WordCount(value string) int {
    // Match non-space character sequences.
    re := regexp.MustCompile(`[\S]+`)

    // Find all matches and return count.
    results := re.FindAllString(value, -1)
    return len(results)
}

func main() {
    // This has 10 words.
    fmt.Println(WordCount("To be or not to be, that is the question."))
    // This has 1 word.
    fmt.Println(WordCount("Hello"))
    // This has 2 words.
    fmt.Println(WordCount("Hello friend"))
}
10
1
2

Notes, results

With some simple string tests, we can see that the results appear correct. The string "Hello" has just 1 word. The string "Hello friend" has 2.

Handling punctuation

An important thing to get right in word counting I show punctuation separates words. A double-hyphen can separate 2 words—the regexp must handle this case.

A review

For an easy-to-write and fairly accurate word counting method, counting sequences of 1 or more non-whitespace chars is a good option. More advanced approaches are possible.