python代码计算字数,使用正则表达式在Python中计算字数

What is the correct way to count English words in a document using regular expression?

I tried with:

words=re.findall('\w+', open('text.txt').read().lower())

len(words)

but it seems I am missing few words (compares to the word count in gedit).

Am I doing it right?

Thanks a lot!

解决方案

Using \w+ won't correctly count words containing apostrophes or hyphens, eg "can't" will be counted as 2 words. It will also count numbers (strings of digits); "12,345" and "6.7" will each count as 2 words ("12" and "345", "6" and "7").