Word Count (Ruby)

Question

CoderByte offers the following challenge: "Using the Ruby language, have the function WordCount(str) take the str string parameter being passed and return the number of words the string contains (ie. "Never eat shredded wheat" would return 4). Words will be separated by single spaces."

I solved it, but is there a simpler solution (that doesn't use regular expressions or methods other than .length)? I have a conditional inside of a conditional inside of a for-loop inside of a for-loop. I also set the current variable to false both inside and outside the first for-loop.

Are these poor practices? Is there a better solution?

def WordCount(string)

    alphabet = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
    counter = 0
    current = false

    for i in 0...string.length
        prev = current
        current = false
        for j in 0...alphabet.length
            if string[i] == alphabet[j]
                current = true
                if prev == false
                    counter += 1
                end
            end
        end
    end

    return counter

end

WordCount(STDIN.gets)

Answer 1

It does involve regular expressions but it's the correct solution:

"Hi there 334".scan(/[[:alpha:]]+/).count # => 2

Answer 2

Hm,

s = "Never eat shredded wheat"
puts s.split.count
# => 4

If you don't want to count underscores and digits:

s = "Never eat shredded wheat 1 _ ?"
puts s.split.reject { |w| w =~ /(\W|_|\d)/ }.count
# => 4

even more advanced regexp:

s = "Never __ 111 ?? eat shredded wheat. _Word?"
p s.split.reject { |w| w !~ /([a-zA-Z]+(_[a-zA-Z]+)*)/ }
# => ["Never", "eat", "shredded", "wheat.", "_Word?"]