1 line of code: How to count the words in a string

const countWords = str => str.trim().split(/\s+/g).length;

Optimised code

const countWords = str => str.trim().split(/\s+/g).map(i => i.replace(/[\[\]?.,\/#!$%\^&\*;:{}=\"\-_~()…–—·'’]/g,"")).filter(i=>i).length;

Returns the number of words in a given string.

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The repository & npm package

You can find the all the utility functions from this series at github.com/martinkr/onelinecode
The library is also published to npm as @onelinecode for your convenience.

The code and the npm package will be updated every time I publish a new article.

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Photo by zoo_monkey on Unsplash

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Comments

[Alex Lohr]

This would count ' - ' as a word. It would be better to use \W instead of \s.

[Martin Krause]

Hi Alex,

thank you for you contribution. You are right, a - surrounded by spaces would count as a word. Unfortunaltey, \W breaks something like "foo-bar" also into two words.
Based on you input I refined the code with a regular expression removing all punctuation chars from the results.
I would love I you have some feedback on this!

Thank you,

Martin

[Alex Lohr]

Non-word-characters only lead to errors if delimited by space on either side. So you can do

str.replace(/\s\W+\s/g, ' ').trim()...

[Dennis Frijlink]

Thnx for this post! I like small useful code snippets like this!

[Martin Krause]

Hi Dennis,
check out the oder articles in the series!

Cheers!