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 Entire forum ➜ MUSHclient ➜ Lua ➜ How to count words in a variable

How to count words in a variable

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Posted by Rene   (46 posts)  Bio
Date Tue 03 Oct 2017 12:48 AM (UTC)
Message
I want to count words in a variable to know how many words it contains, I assume it can be done by matching white spaces, assuming the variable is called 'vnum', how would I do that?

Also, how can I break up each word in 'vnum' into a separate value in an array? meaning if 'vnum' is how are you today, the array would be vnum = {"how", "are", "you", "today"}
Thanks!
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (23,133 posts)  Bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #1 on Tue 03 Oct 2017 07:33 AM (UTC)

Amended on Thu 05 Oct 2017 09:46 PM (UTC) by Nick Gammon

Message
You can use string.gmatch, like this:


for w in string.gmatch ("nick takes a stroll", "%a+") do
  print (w)
end -- for


By altering the regular expression (ie. "%a+") you can change what you define a "word" to be (eg. does it include numbers?)

Having done that you can count things (eg, add one to a counter instead of printing).

Similarly you could insert each word into an array.


http://www.gammon.com.au/scripts/doc.php?lua=string.gmatch

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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