How do I count the words in a string?

Answer:

You can use Python's built-in split() string method to accomplish this. It works like this:

>>> string = "hello world how are you"
>>> string.split()
['hello', 'world', 'how', 'are', 'you']

The length of the returned list is the word count. So we end up with:

def count_words(string):
    return len(string.split())

And testing it:

>>> count_words(string)
5