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

import string 

sentence = "I     am having  a   very  nice  23!@$      day. "
# Remove all punctuations
sentence = sentence.translate(str.maketrans('', '', string.punctuation))
# Remove all numbers"
sentence = ''.join([word for word in sentence if not word.isdigit()])
count = 0;
for index in range(len(sentence)-1) :
    if sentence[index+1].isspace() and not sentence[index].isspace():
        count += 1 
print(count)