Core Java >> Strings
Count words in a String
If a Java program needs to count the number of words in a string then there are multiple ways to do so.
The following program shows how to count the number of words of a string.
Java word count program
package com.example;
/** This class is a Java tutorial for counting words in String
*
* @author Extreme Java
*/
public class Test{
/** This method shows how to find the number of words in String
*
* @param args
*/
public static void main(String[] args){
String str = "This is a test string";
String[] count = str.split(" ");
System.out.println(count.length);
}
}
output:
5
Caution
Of course, the program assumes that the words in the string are separated by single white space. If your string has some other delimiter then use the same in the call to split method of String class.
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Comments
Theo Vosse
1. Note that split() just uses a regular expression. E.g., you might like to use something like “[:;,.!? \t\r\n]+”. Note that the + is important. Splitting on \s* could split the string into characters; omitting it leads to empty words for two or more consecutive separating characters.
2. Don’t call the resulting array “count”; it’s misleading.
Julio
1. If we only want to count words this is short but wastes a lot of memory by creating the whole String array.
2. It would be trivial to improve b by using
.split("\s*")to handle words separated by more than one space.