Can regex match all the words outside quotation marks?

Question

I recently typed an essay for my lit class, and my teacher specifically stated a word limit that does not include quotations from the piece. And I thought, why not make a sc

Answer 1

Depending on the requirements, could use The Greatest Regex Trick Ever

"[^"]*"|(\w+)

And count the matches of the first capture group.

\w+ matches one or more word characters.

See test at regex101.com

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Also skip single quoted strings:

"[^"]*"|'[^']*'|(\w+)

test at regex101