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.
And Letters or digits are non-whitespace characters. We can use a special regexp metacharacter to detect these.
Detail In WordCount we invoke FindAllString with a -1 argument—this finds all matches.
Finally We return the length of the results found by FindAllString. This is our entire word counting method.
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.
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