How to get the number of real words in a text in Swift [duplicate] - swift

Question

This question already has answers here:
Number of words in a Swift String for word count calculation
(7 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
Edit: there is already a question similar to this one but it's for numbers separated by a specific character (Get no. Of words in swift for average calculator). Instead this question is about to get the number of real words in a text, separated in various ways: a line break, some line breaks, a space, more than a space etc.
I would like to get the number of words in a string with Swift 3.
I'm using this code but I get imprecise result because the number is get counting the spaces and new lines instead of the effective number of words.
let str = "Architects and city planners,are \ndesigning buildings to create a better quality of life in our urban areas."
// 18 words, 21 spaces, 2 lines
let components = str.components(separatedBy: .whitespacesAndNewlines)
let a = components.count
print(a)
// 23 instead of 18

Answer 1

Consecutive spaces and newlines aren't coalesced into one generic whitespace region, so you're simply getting a bunch of empty "words" between successive whitespace characters. Get rid of this by filtering out empty strings:
let components = str.components(separatedBy: .whitespacesAndNewlines)
let words = components.filter { !$0.isEmpty }
print(words.count) // 17
The above will print 17 because you haven't included , as a separation character, so the string "planners,are" is treated as one word.
You can break that string up as well by adding punctuation characters to the set of separators like so:
let chararacterSet = CharacterSet.whitespacesAndNewlines.union(.punctuationCharacters)
let components = str.components(separatedBy: chararacterSet)
let words = components.filter { !$0.isEmpty }
print(words.count) // 18
Now you'll see a count of 18 like you expect.