Count number of words per row in a string

Say I have the following text:

str = [
    "an example of a short sentence" 
    "a second short sentence"]

I would like to count the total number of words per row.

In this case, I want matlab to tell me: 6, 4

I have tried the "count" command, but it is only meant to find specific words.

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Try this:

str = [...
    "an example of a short sentence" ;
    "a second short sentence"]
counts = zeros(size(str));
for row = 1 : length(str)
    counts(row) = length(strsplit(str(row)));
end

Answer 2

[Voss]

I won't claim that this is the best way to do it, or that it'll work for anything you want to consider a "word" in your string array, but here's something:

str = [
    "an example of a short sentence" 
    "a second short sentence"];

arrayfun(@(x)numel(strsplit(x)),str)

ans = 2×1

6 4

Answer 3

[Les Beckham]

In 2020b or later you can also use a pattern with a regex pattern to find (and count) words. It took some experimenting to get this right but it works.

str = [
"an example of a short sentence"
"a second short sentence"];
count(str, regexpPattern('\w*'))

ans = 2×1

6 4

If you don't want to allow underscores and numbers in your "words", use this. This allows one optional capital letter only at the beginning of the words.

count(str, regexpPattern('[A-Z]?[a-z]*'))

ans = 2×1

6 4