Count words in a sentence in Python program

In this article, we will learn different approaches to count the number of words in a string in Python. This is a common text processing task that can be accomplished using several methods.

Problem statement ? We are given a string and need to count the number of words in it.

Using split() Method

The split() method breaks the string into a list using space as the default delimiter. This is the simplest and most commonly used approach ?

Example

test_string = "Tutorials point is a learning platform"

# Display original string
print("The original string is:", test_string)

# Count words using split() method
word_count = len(test_string.split())

# Display result
print("The number of words in string are:", word_count)

Output

The original string is: Tutorials point is a learning platform
The number of words in string are: 6

Using Regular Expressions

The re.findall() function with pattern \w+ matches sequences of word characters. This method handles punctuation better than simple splitting ?

Example

import re

test_string = "Tutorials point is a learning platform"

# Display original string
print("The original string is:", test_string)

# Count words using regex findall()
word_count = len(re.findall(r'\w+', test_string))

# Display result
print("The number of words in string are:", word_count)

Output

The original string is: Tutorials point is a learning platform
The number of words in string are: 6

Using sum() with List Comprehension

This approach uses sum() with a list comprehension to count valid words while filtering out punctuation ?

Example

import string

test_string = "Tutorials point is a learning platform"

# Display original string
print("The original string is:", test_string)

# Count words using sum() + strip() + isalpha()
word_count = sum([word.strip(string.punctuation).isalpha() 
                  for word in test_string.split()])

# Display result
print("The number of words in string are:", word_count)

Output

The original string is: Tutorials point is a learning platform
The number of words in string are: 6

Comparison of Methods

Conclusion

Use split() for simple word counting in clean text. For text with punctuation, re.findall() provides better accuracy. The list comprehension approach offers the most control for complex filtering requirements.