Count words

[John Otto Knoke]

Hello,

I need help to create an Expression that counts how many words are in each cell row.For example, the value at the screenshot has 4 words. Thanks in advance!

[Joe Wicentowski]

Hi John,

> I need help to create an Expression that counts how many words are in each cell row.For example, the value at the screenshot has 4 words. Thanks in advance!

This should do the trick:

value.split(" ").length()

If you want to account for multiple spaces, you can use the regular
expression form for "whitespace characters", \s, with the "one or
more" cardinality expression, +:

value.split(/\s+/).length()

Joe

[John Otto Knoke]

Thanks, Joe, it works perfectly. I understand the split at the space but why you added at the end length()

Thanks again

Joe

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[Joe Wicentowski]

Hi John,

Great!  Split returns an array, and length counts the number of items in an array.  You'd think they'd have chosen the word "count", but alas.  Here is the documentation for array-related functions:

  https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/GREL-Array-Functions

Joe

Sent from my iPhone

[Thad Guidry]

The idea of the "length of array" dates back to I think ANSI C constructs, maybe before, but here is basically the definition as to the "why" in paragraph 2 of this:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se7/html/jls-10.html

Specifically, "If an array has n components, we say n is the length of the array; the components of the array are referenced using integer indices from 0 to n - 1, inclusive."

We decided not to break convention from many other programming languages by going with the term "count".

Thad

+ThadGuidry