Word count

How many words are in a string? To answer, we can develop a Python method, wordcount, that uses re.findall to count words.

Python method info

The wordcount() method locates and counts non-whitespace characters with a special pattern. This allows us to avoid complex character testing in a loop.

Example

The re.findall method is the most important part of this solution. It finds all matches within a string. When we count them, we can count matching patterns.

import re

def wordcount(value):
    # Find all non-whitespace patterns.
    list = re.findall(r"(\S+)", value)
    # Return length of resulting list.
    return len(list)

value = "To be or not to be, that is the question."
print(wordcount(value))

value = "Welcome, friend, to my website!"
print(wordcount(value))

value = ""
print(wordcount(value))
10
5
0

Method results

I verified that the method counted correctly the number of words in both (trivial) examples. On more complex samples, such as ones involving markup, results may be less accurate.

Summary

The regular expression based method for counting words does not exactly mirror all word counting implementations. But in practice the results are close.