C# Regex Word Count

I notice from my traffic log that there was someone bumping to this blog searching for ‘C# Regex Word Count’. Since I never create such tutorial, so here you go.

The basic rule of a word would be it doesn’t contain any whitespaces (spaces, tabs, or newlines). So the easiest Regex would be:

[^\ ^\t^\n]+

Now to implement it using C#, It would be as follows:

      public int WordCount(String input)
      {
         int result = 0;
         try
         {
            Regex rgx = new Regex(@"[^\\ ^\\t^\\n]+");
            MatchCollection mcMatches = rgx.Matches(input);
            result = mcMatches.Count;            
         }
         catch (Exception ex)
         {
         }
         return result;
      }

An improvement would be putting the Regex creation out of the function, this way we will not re-created the Regex everytime the function is called.