How to count the amount of words in a text file in Lua

Question

I was wanting to ask what the steps are to creating a Lua program that would count the amount of words in a .txt file? I'm only familiar with how to count characters and not strings.

Mechanism

counting words accurately is tricky, there are so many edge cases with hyphens and em dashes etc. A simple one might use string.gfind – Originality

Check out the book Programming in Lua (which has a free version online) - program to count the number of characters, words, and lines in a file: lua.org/pil/21.2.1.html – Hull

@rpattiso, string.gfind has been renamed string.gmatch since then. – Hwahwan

@Hwahwan sorry, looks like 5.0 was the last appearance of string.gfind – Originality

Answer 1

A sequence of nonspace characters is a good approximation to what a word is.

In that case, this simple code counts the words in a string s:

_,n = s:gsub("%S+","")
print(n)

This works because gsub returns the number of substitutions made as a second result. This count is rarely used, and sometimes even a minor annoyance, but in this case it's exactly what is needed.

Hwahwan