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")

To count the number of words in this vector I used this (as given here Count the number of words in a string in R?, which is a possible duplicate but with another issue)

No_words <- sapply(gregexpr("\\W+", str), length) + 1

but it returns

6 2 2 2

String has only 1 element in last two places (i.e. "tusla" and "laq")

so it should return

6 2 1 1

How do I get around this problem?

@RomanLuštrik what if string has multiple spaces in between few words? for example. str <- c("this is a string current trey", "feather rtttt", "tusla", "laq") Then it does not work. It counts those extra spaces too. I hope you get it what i am trying to say. — user3664020, May 22 '14 at 08:50
@user3664020, the answer is in the question you have linked. `str1 <- gsub(' {2,}',' ',str); sapply(strsplit(str1, " "), length)`. Also, `str` is a stored function in R, please try to refrain from storing your strings in there — David Arenburg, May 22 '14 at 08:59
Using `"\\s+"` instead of `" "` in `strsplit` will allow you to consider and ignore multiple spaces between words. — BenBarnes, May 22 '14 at 09:07

score 13 · Accepted Answer · answered May 22 '14 at 09:28

13

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

answered May 22 '14 at 09:28

CHP

16,981
4
38
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Your second answer fails on " leading and trailing ", returning 4. – Spacedman May 22 '14 at 09:41
the first answer fails with empty strings "" returns 1 – jpmarindiaz Jul 02 '15 at 23:23

score 11 · Answer 2 · answered May 22 '14 at 09:44

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

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited Jul 14 '20 at 12:49

1

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

edited Jul 14 '20 at 12:49

David Buck

3,752
35
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answered Jul 14 '20 at 12:32

Sdae

21
3

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

3 Answers3

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