Python program to calculate the number of words and characters in the string

Last Updated : 16 Jan, 2025

We are given a string we need to find the total number of words and total number of character in the given string.

For Example we are given a string s = "Geeksforgeeks is best Computer Science Portal" we need to count the total words in the given string and the total characters in the given string. In this case, it will be total words will be 6 and total characters will be 45. To find these we can use methods like split() and regex and many more.

Using split()

split function is quite useful and usually quite a generic method to get words out of the list but this approach fails once we introduce special characters in the list.

Python

s = "Geeksforgeeks is best Computer Science Portal"
# using split()
# to count words in string
res = len(s.split())

# printing result
print("The number of words in string are : " + str(res))
print("The number of words in string are : ", len(s))

Output

The number of words in string are : 6
The number of words in string are :  45

Explanation:

Split() method divides the string into words using whitespace as the delimiter, and len() counts the number of elements in the resulting list. This accurately gives the word count.
len(s) counts the total number of characters in the string, not the words, leading to an incorrect result.

Using regex module

findall() function is used to count the number of words in the sentence available in a regex module.

Python

import re
s = "GeeksForGeeks is a learning platform" 

# using regex (findall()) function
res = len(re.findall(r'\w+', s))

# total no of words
print("The number of words in string are : " + str(res))
print("The number of Characters in string are : ", len(s))

Output

The number of words in string are : 5
The number of Characters in string are :  36

Explanation:

re.findall(r'\w+', s) function uses a regex pattern to match all sequences of alphanumeric characters in the string. The length of the resulting list gives the total number of words.
len(s) counts all characters in the string, including spaces, resulting in the total character count.

Using sum()+ strip()+ split() function

Here we first check all the words in the given sentence and add them using the sum() function.

Python

import string


s = "GeeksForGeeks is a learning platform"

# using sum() + strip() + split() function
res = sum([i.strip(string.punctuation).isalpha() for i in
           s.split()])

# no of words
print("The number of words in string are : " + str(res))
print("The number of characters in string are : ", len(s))

Output

The number of words in string are : 5
The number of characters in string are :  36

Explanation:

Code splits the string into words, strips punctuation using string.punctuation, and checks if each stripped word contains only alphabetic characters with isalpha(). The sum() adds up True values (counted as 1) for all valid words.
len(s) calculates the total number of characters in the string, including letters, spaces, and punctuation.