Has anyone developed a technique to count the number of words in a string? A blank is the word separator. I would like to create a report that counts the number of words in an A254 field.

What about using ARGLEN to find out how many characters are in the string, Doing a STRIP to remove all blank spaces, and then doing an ARGLEN again on the result? The difference (plus one) should be the number of words you had.

Very slick! I will try this. Thanks!

Very slick!

Here is the code for the DEFINE FUNCTION I created using your suggested technique.

DEFINE FUNCTION WORDCNT(THESRCE/A254)
ORG_LEN/I3=ARGLEN(254,THESRCE,'I3');
SHRTVER/A254=STRIP(254,THESRCE,' ','A254');
NEW_LEN/I3=ARGLEN(254,SHRTVER,'I3');
WORDCNT/I3=ORG_LEN - NEW_LEN + 1;
END

TABLE FILE MYFILE
PRINT DESCRIPTION
COMPUTE DESCWORDS/I3=WORDCNT(DESCRIPTION);
END

This works great! Things like a directory structure (c:\inetpub\wwwroot\baseapps) get counted as one word but for my purpoases this is perfect.

Thanks again!

(I'm kind of liking this DEFINE FUNCTION thing.)

and if there are multiple spaces between words? What then?

Then you could incorporate the SQUEEZ function (Reduce Multiple Spaces to a Single Space)