Regular Expression for accurate word-count using JavaScript

Question

I\'m trying to put together a regular expression for a JavaScript command that accurately counts the number of words in a textarea.

One solution I had found is as fo

Answer 1

This should do what you're after:

value.match(/\S+/g).length;

Rather than splitting the string, you're matching on any sequence of non-whitespace characters.

There's the added bonus of being easily able to extract each word if needed ;)

Answer 2

The correct regexp would be /s+/ in order to discard non-words:

'Lorem ipsum dolor , sit amet'.split(/\S+/g).length
7
'Lorem ipsum dolor , sit amet'.split(/\s+/g).length
6

Answer 3

Try to count anything that is not whitespace and with a word boundary:

value.split(/\b\S+\b/g).length

You could also try to use unicode ranges, but I am not sure if the following one is complete:

value.split(/[\u0080-\uFFFF\w]+/g).length

Answer 4

Try

    value.match(/\w+/g).length;

This will match a string of characters that can be in a word. Whereas something like:

    value.match(/\S+/g).length;

will result in an incorrect count if the user adds commas or other punctuation that is not followed by a space - or adds a comma with a space either side of it.

Answer 5

For me this gave the best results:

value.split(/\b\W+\b/).length

with

var words = value.split(/\b\W+\b/)

you get all words.

Explanation:

• \b is a word boundary
• \W is a NON-word character, capital usually means the negation
• '+' means 1 or more characters or the prefixed character class

I recommend learning regular expressions. It's a great skill to have because they are so powerful. ;-)

Answer 6

you could extend/change you methods like this

document.querySelector("#wordcount").innerHTML = document.querySelector("#editor").value.split(/\b\(.*?)\b/).length -1; if you want to match things like email-addresses as well

and

document.querySelector("#wordcount").innerHTML = document.querySelector("#editor").value.trim().split(/\s+/g).length -1;

also try using \s as its the \w for unicode

source:http://www.regular-expressions.info/charclass.html