Want to detect all the words in the string

Question

So ive written a code which would detect all the words that are there in a sentence. I would only detect the words and would ignore the spaces, which means even if there are empty spaces in the string i would not count them. But the result are not what i expected. Here is the code :

var mystring = "Hello World"
var indexcount = 0
var words = 0

for (element of mystring) {
  if (element == " " || element[indexcount + 1] != " " || element[indexcount - 1] != " ") {
    var words = words + 1
    var indexcount = indexcount + 1
  } else {
    indexcount = indexcount + 1
  }
}

console.log(words);

So this code would actually help anyone who would want to know all the words that are there in a string, ignoring all the spaces. So even if you had just a single word within a string and a lot of spaces still, the result would be 1. But i am getting weird ouputs. please help

Answer 1

You have several errors:

1. Don't use var after the first use on a variable
2. When the element isn't a space, check whether it's
   a. a first element in a string (indexcount === 0)
   b. or the previous character is a space (mystring[index - 1] === ' ')
   If so increase the word count

var mystring = "Hello World"
var indexcount = 0
var words = 0

for (var element of mystring) {
  if (element !== " " && (indexcount === 0 || mystring[indexcount - 1] === " ")) {
    words = words + 1;
  }
  indexcount = indexcount + 1;
}

console.log(words);

Consider using a state machine:

var mystring = ` Hello 
                 World `;

const spaces = new Set('\t\r\n '.split('')); // detect spaces with a set
let words = 0;
let inWord = false; //whether we are inside of a word or not

for(const char of mystring){
  if(spaces.has(char)){
    inWord = false;
  } else if(!inWord) {
    words++; 
    inWord = true;
  }
}
   
console.log(words);

You could also use a regex:

var mystring = ` Hello 
                 World `;

const words = mystring.match(/(?<=\s|^)(?=\S)/g).length;
   
console.log(words);