Function to count the number of words in a string or text field

[Maria_Korolov]

I haven’t been able to find an answer to this on the site, but there doesn’t seem to be a function to count the number of words in a text field. There’s a function to count the number of characters – LEN.

One workaround could be to the count the number of spaces in a text string, but I don’t see a function to do that, either. SEARCH and FIND return the first position of the search string inside the text, not the total number of times the search string occurs.

A word count function is very important for using AirTable as a content management system.

[Elias_Gomez_Sai]

:thinking: It’s explained in the post cited which you have replied to :man_shrugging:

This one:

Counting linked records in the same table Ask the community

You can do this: Transform Linked Records into a String: ARRAYJOIN(LR) Get length of String: LEN(String) Remove the commas and get the length of the String: LEN(SUBSTITUTE(String,',' , '')) The difference is the number of commas, that is the number of Linked Records minus 1 Sum 1 to the commas number: Length - {No commas} + 1. Oh, I have wrapped the last step into a IF() to check if there are linked records so we don’t get 1 when they are not: IF({Linked Records}, Length - {No commas} + 1,…

[Samir_Ghosh]

Thanks all, and W_Vann_Hall. The latest formula displays “1” if text field is empty. So slight modification:

IF({English Text},
    LEN(
        SUBSTITUTE(
            SUBSTITUTE(
                SUBSTITUTE(
                    {English Text},
                    "\n",
                    " "
                    ),
                "  ",
                " "
                ),
            "  ",
            " "
            )
        ) -
      LEN(
        SUBSTITUTE(
            SUBSTITUTE(
                {English Text},
                " ",
                ""
                ),
            "\n",
            ""
            )
        ) + 
      1,
    0
)