How to do word counts for a mixture of English and Chinese in Javascript

Question

I want to count the number of words in a passage that contains both English and Chinese. For English, it's simple. Each word is a word. For Chinese, we count each character as a word. Therefore, 香港人 is three words here. So for example, "I am a 香港人" should have a word count of 6. Any idea how can I count it in Javascript/jQuery? Thanks!

Accepted Answer

Try a regex like this:

```
/[\u00ff-\uffff]|\S+/g
```

For example, `"I am a 香港人".match(/[\u00ff-\uffff]|\S+/g)` gives:

```
["I", "am", "a", "香", "港", "人"]
```

Then you can just check the length of the resulting array.

The `\u00ff-\uffff` part of the regex is a unicode character range; you probably want to narrow this down to just the characters you want to count as words. For example, CJK Unified would be `\u4e00-\u9fcc`.

```
function countWords(str) {
    var matches = str.match(/[\u00ff-\uffff]|\S+/g);
    return matches ? matches.length : 0;
}
```

How to do word counts for a mixture of English and Chinese in Javascript

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