How to count the number of words in a sentence, ignoring numbers, punctuation and whitespace?

Question

How would I go about counting the words in a sentence? I\'m using Python.

For example, I might have the string:

string = \"I     am having  a   very         


        

Answer 1

s = "I     am having  a   very  nice  23!@$      day. "
sum([i.strip(string.punctuation).isalpha() for i in s.split()])

The statement above will go through each chunk of text and remove punctuations before verifying if the chunk is really string of alphabets.