Count the number of all words in a string

Question

Is there a function to count the number of words in a string? For example:

str1 <- "How many words are in this sentence"

to return a result of 7.

Answer 1

You can use the sapply and strsplit functions as follows:

str1 <- "How many words are in this sentence"

sapply(strsplit(str1, " "), length)

[1] 7