How do I count the number of words in a text (string)?

Question

I have this string vector (for example):

str <- c(\"this is a string current trey\",
    \"feather rtttt\",
    \"tusla\",
    \"laq\")

Answer 1

Use the stringi package and stri_count:

require(stringi)
str <- c(
"this is a string current trey",
"nospaces",
"multiple    spaces",
"   leadingspaces",
"trailingspaces    ",
"    leading and trailing    ",
"just one space each")

> stri_count(str,regex="\\S+")
[1] 6 1 2 1 1 3 4

Answer 2

You can try

sapply(gregexpr("\\S+", x), length)
## [1] 6 2 1 1

Or as suggested in comments you can try

sapply(strsplit(x, "\\s+"), length)
## [1] 6 2 1 1

Answer 3

Use the wc-function from the qdap package.

str <- c("this is a string current trey", 
         "feather rtttt", 
         "tusla", 
         "laq")

library("qdap")

wc(str)

That returns:

wc(str)

[1] 6 2 1 1