Pandas sum of all word counts in column

Question

I have a pandas column that contains strings. I want to get a word count of all of the words in the entire column. What\'s the best way of doing that without looping through eac

Answer 1

You could use the vectorized string operations:

In [7]: df["a"].str.split().str.len().sum()
Out[7]: 6

which comes from

In [8]: df["a"].str.split()
Out[8]: 
0          [some, words]
1    [lots, more, words]
2                   [hi]
Name: a, dtype: object

In [9]: df["a"].str.split().str.len()
Out[9]: 
0    2
1    3
2    1
Name: a, dtype: int64

In [10]: df["a"].str.split().str.len().sum()
Out[10]: 6