Trying to count words in a string

Question

I\'m trying to analyze the contents of a string. If it has a punctuation mixed in the word I want to replace them with spaces.

For example, If Johnny.Appleseed!is:a*good

Answer 1

Here's a one-line solution that doesn't require importing any libraries.
It replaces non-alphanumeric characters (like punctuation) with spaces, and then splits the string.

Inspired from "Python strings split with multiple separators"

>>> s = 'Johnny.Appleseed!is:a*good&farmer'
>>> words = ''.join(c if c.isalnum() else ' ' for c in s).split()
>>> words
['Johnny', 'Appleseed', 'is', 'a', 'good', 'farmer']
>>> len(words)
6