Can regex match all the words outside quotation marks?

Question

I recently typed an essay for my lit class, and my teacher specifically stated a word limit that does not include quotations from the piece. And I thought, why not make a sc

Answer 1

This is easy enough using PCRE (or Perl of course):

".*?"(*SKIP)(?!)|(?

Use the g modifier, and s if you want to handle multiline quotes.

Demo

Here's the x version for readability:

  ".*?"              (*SKIP)(?!)
| (?

The first part will match everything inside " or ' quotes and will discard it ((*SKIP)(?!)). The second part will match all words (I've included ' as being part of a word in this example). The ' character will be counted as a quote boundary only at start/end of words, to let you use things like isn't for instance.

Possible modifications:

• To count the text isn't as two words, replace [\w']+ with \w+.
• To count text like mother-in-law as one word instead of 3, replace [\w']+ with [-\w']+.

You get the point ;)

And here's a full Perl script that uses this regex:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;

$_ = do { local $/; <> };
print scalar (() = /".*?"(*SKIP)(?!)|(?

Execute it passing in a file or STDIN containing the text you want to count the words in, and it will output the word count on STDOUT.