5 Effective Ways to Count Words in a JavaScript String

Counting words is a common task in the programming world. For example, to find out how many words are in a sentence, to determine the length of the text, to analyze SEO titles or descriptions, or for content processing, etc. In today's blog, I will discuss how to solve the above problem easily using JavaScript and find the number of words in a string with detailed code.

function countWords(str) {
    // Extra spaces have been removed
    str = str.trim();
    // If the string is empty, there are no words
    if (str === "") {
      return 0;
    }
    // Split the string by spaces and return the length of the array
    const words = str.split(/\s+/);
    return words.length;
  }
  
// Example
const sentence = "notesaid24 provides best programming tutorial";
console.log(countWords(sentence)); // Output: 5

Explanation:

• First, the extra spaces at the beginning and end of the string are removed using the trim() method, so that the word count is correct.
• We use the split(/\s+/) method to split the string according to the space. Here /\s+/ is a regular expression that separates one or more spaces.
• Then we find the total number of words using the length of the array.

Method 2 –

function countWordsUsingMatch(str) {
  // Trim and remove extra spaces
  str = str.trim();

  // Find words using regular expression
  const words = str.match(/\b\w+\b/g);
  
  // Return 0 if no words are found, otherwise return the total word count
  return words ? words.length : 0;
}

// Example
const sentence = "notesaid24 provides best programming tutorial";
console.log(countWordsUsingMatch(sentence)); // Output: 5

Explanation: /\b\w+\b/g This regular expression separates each word. Here, the beginning and end of each word are marked with \b and each word is marked with \w+.

Method 3 –

function countWordsUsingReduce(str) {
  // Trim and remove extra spaces
  str = str.trim();

  // If the string is empty, return 0
  if (str === "") {
    return 0;
  }

  // Split the string by spaces and count words using reduce
  return str.split(/\s+/).reduce((count, word) => word ? count + 1 : count, 0);
}

// Example
const sentence = "notesaid24 provides best programming tutorial";
console.log(countWordsUsingReduce(sentence)); // Output: 5

Explanation: First, the string is split by spaces, then the JavaScript reduce method is used to loop over each word and count.

Method 4 –

function countWordsUsingLoop(str) {
  // Trim the string to remove extra spaces
  str = str.trim();

  let count = 0;
  let inWord = false;

  // Loop through each character in the string
  for (let i = 0; i < str.length; i++) {
    if (str[i] !== ' ') {
      if (!inWord) {
        count++;
        inWord = true;
      }
    } else {
      inWord = false;
    }
  }

  return count;
}

// Example
const sentence = "notesaid24 provides best programming tutorial";
console.log(countWordsUsingLoop(sentence)); // Output: 5

Explanation: Each word in the string is checked. If there is no space at the beginning of the word, it is counted as a new word and the inWord flag is set to true. When a space is found again, the inWord flag is set to false.

Method 5 –

function countWordsUsingFilter(str) {
  // Split the string by spaces and filter out empty strings, then return the length
  return str.split(' ').filter(word => word !== '').length;
}

// Example
const sentence = "notesaid24 provides best programming tutorial";
console.log(countWordsUsingFilter(sentence)); // Output: 5

Explanation: First, each word is separated using split(' ') and the filter method is used to remove blank words and return the length of the array.

 

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