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

Ok here is my version of doing this. I noticed that you want your output to be 7, which means you dont want to count special characters and numbers. So here is regex pattern:

re.findall("[a-zA-Z_]+", string)

Where [a-zA-Z_] means it will match any character beetwen a-z (lowercase) and A-Z (upper case).

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About spaces. If you want to remove all extra spaces, just do:

string = string.rstrip().lstrip() # Remove all extra spaces at the start and at the end of the string
while "  " in string: # While  there are 2 spaces beetwen words in our string...
    string = string.replace("  ", " ") # ... replace them by one space!