- The String object's split() method returns an array of strings, separated with the character(s) passed as argument: a space character will count the number of words in a sentence.
var sentence = "I learn JavaScript";
var words = sentence.split(" "); // space as separator
alert( "Found " + words.length + " words in that sentence!" ); // 3 - Let's get the word count from a <textarea> (called "txt") with a single-line statement:
var wordCount = document.getElementById("txt").value.split(" ").length;Tip: pass anything you like, but enclose your argument inside single or double-quotes.
- You can pass escaped characters like "\n" (new line) or "\t" (tab). Count the number of lines:
var numberOfLines = document.getElementById("txt").value.split("\n").length; - The split() method is case-sensitive: use toUpperCase() or toLowerCase() as workaround:
var str = "I do this AND I do that and then this And finally that.";
var steps = str.toLowerCase().split("and");
alert( steps.length ); // returns 4
// Without toLowerCase(), a 2-elements array would have been returned. - Getting a single-element array back is your cue that the string couldn't be split; a more efficient approach is to first check if the delimiter exists in the string, using the indexOf() method:
var str = "I do this AND I do that and then this And finally that.";
if( str.toLowerCase().indexOf("and") > -1 )
alert("Go ahead and split!"); - If the delimiter isn't found, split() returns the original string as a single-element array:
var sentence = "I learn JavaScript";
var splitArr = sentence.split("carrot");
alert( "Returned array has " + splitArr.length + " elements." ); // 1 - To limit the size of the returned array, pass a "maximum" number as second, optional argument:
var sentence = "I learn JavaScript";
var splitArr = sentence.split(" ", 2); // maximum two elements
alert( "Array elements:\n" + splitArr.join("\n") ); // Show one per line - The PHP equivalent to JavaScript's split() method is the explode() function:
$sentence = 'I learn PHP';
$words = explode(' ', $sentence);
echo 'Found ' . count( $words ) . ' words in that sentence!'; Sister / opposite method: join() concatenates array elements with a string you supply.
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