Word count for textbox

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Posted on 4 Mar 2021 16:49:31 by techtudoor

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So I am building an App that has a multi-line textbox that needs to have a limit of x amount of words. I can count characters, but not sure how to do a word count to show the user the amount of words they have typed or have left.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated

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CrimsonCrayon 68 on 17 Feb 2023 at 18:51:47

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Re: Word count for textbox

I used this solution and it has worked great ... but I had one user hit the carriage return a few times after entering their input and the function seemed to count these blank rows as well. Is there anyway around this?
Shaheer Ahmad 2,194 Super User 2025 Season 1 on 25 Jul 2022 at 09:15:34

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Re: Word count for textbox

Thanks a lot brother
timl 35,109 Super User 2025 Season 1 on 25 Jul 2022 at 08:59:09

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Re: Word count for textbox

@ShaheerAhmad

The Len function returns the number of letters/characters.

Len(TextInput1.Text)
Shaheer Ahmad 2,194 Super User 2025 Season 1 on 24 Jul 2022 at 13:32:16

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Re: Word count for textbox

Can you please tell me a solution to get the number of letters instead of words?
techtudoor 249 on 04 Mar 2021 at 17:30:10

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Re: Word count for textbox

Thanks Randy. That explanation was great. It now makes sense. Greatly appreciate you taking time to explain this.
RandyHayes 76,287 Super User 2024 Season 1 on 04 Mar 2021 at 17:13:01

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Re: Word count for textbox

@techtudoor

This is a regular expression. It essentially says - match any thing that is not a white space (\S) and ends with either zero or more (?) a whitespace (/s) or zero or more (?) a newline (\n)

So this text:

The quick brown fox

Is :

\S\S\S\s\S\S\S\S\S\n\S\S\S\S\S\s\S\S\S\s T h e q u i c k b r o w n f o x

The regular expression "\S*(\s|\n?)" says to match all of the \S's that end with \s or \n

The MatchAll function returns a table. The table has records with two columns, the FullMatch and the character location. We only care about the number of full matches and we first filter that to make sure we have no blank full matches, then count the number of rows.
techtudoor 249 on 04 Mar 2021 at 17:05:35

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Re: Word count for textbox

@timl

Thank you, I will keep this in mind if I need to do this for a single line of text input.
techtudoor 249 on 04 Mar 2021 at 17:04:36

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Re: Word count for textbox

@RandyHayes

That worked great, Thank you so much. Now to show my ignorance. Could you explain what "\S*(\s|\n?)" is doing? This way I can understand what I am doing rather than just typing it in.

Thank you
RandyHayes 76,287 Super User 2024 Season 1 on 04 Mar 2021 at 17:01:35

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Re: Word count for textbox

@techtudoor

Yep, @timl 's solution will work too, but you might have issue with that for a mult-line text as words in those that are at the end of a line are typically ended with a char(10). The match function expression will account for that.
timl 35,109 Super User 2025 Season 1 on 04 Mar 2021 at 16:58:51

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Re: Word count for textbox

Hi @techtudoor

I'd suggest pretty much the same as Randy. I usually just split the text by the space character and do a count of the result.

CountRows(Split(TextInput2.Text, " "))