$Words

The $WORDS function returns the number of words in a specified string, delimited by a blank or optionally specified character.

Syntax

The format of the $WORDS function is:

$WORDS('inputstring', ['delimiter'])

where:

• inputstring is the input from which the specified word is to be extracted. inputstring can be a quoted literal or a %variable.
• delimiter is an optional character to be used as a delimiter in parsing the input string into words. If delimiter is not specified, it defaults to a blank space.

Usage

Null values between delimiters are not considered words. For example,

$WORDS('ABC==D=XXX','=')

returns a count of three words, not four.

Example

The following function returns 4, the number of words in the string when a blank delimits a word:

$WORDS ('NOW IS THE TIME')