Word count in string

[Former Member]

Can anybody suggest a solution for the following scenario ?

I want to either

a) transform a full name string which may contain multiple spaces to one containing single spaces i.e.

'Fred Joe Sid Andy Bloggs'

to become

'Fred Joe Sid Andy Bloggs'

or

b) count the component words in the string, the above full name string would return 5.

I've tried match_pattten with no luck.

There is an Oracle function , regexp_replace which would do for a) .

Thanks,

Eric.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Re above

'Fred Joe Sid Andy Bloggs' to become 'Fred Joe Sid Andy Bloggs'

[former_member467822 · Accepted solution]

Same thing with the counting. Just create a function based on the following code and you can count the words.

$instring = 'Fred Joe Sid Andy Bloggs';

$cnt=1;

while (word($instring, $cnt) is not null)

$cnt=$cnt+1;

$cnt=$cnt-1;

print($cnt);

[former_member467822 · Accepted solution]

Actually it's the way the HTML is displayed in the browser. If you look at the source you'll see the extra spaces there. Either way the code I posted should work.

[Former Member]

That's worked fine.

Thanks

[Former Member]

This wonderful forum software does just what I want, it reduces multiple spaces to single spaces.

Just try and imagine the first string with lots of spaces.

Thanks.

[former_member467822]

In script it's pretty simple to remove the extra spaces. For example:

$instring = 'Fred Joe Sid Andy Bloggs';

print($instring);

while (index($instring, ' ', 1)>0)

$instring=replace_substr( $instring,' ',' ');

print($instring);

Just take the while and the line after and put them into a function and you can call it from a mapping.

[Former Member]

Or, referring to above,

does anybody have the correct pattern string to match the following

'alpha_string||space_string||alpha_string||space_string||alpha_string||space_string||alpha_string'

i.e 'Fred Joe Sid Dave Bloggs'

Thanks again,

Eric.