Hello, @coises,
Regarding my post, I admit that the concept of a word is rather difficult to grasp. On that note, this is developed in the Martin Haspelmath’s article, published in June 2010, which highlights this point :
Follow this link https://zenodo.org/records/225844 to see the PDF file or use https://zenodo.org/records/225844/files/WordSegmentaionFL.pdf to download it !
Here are a few excerpts of his publication : :
At end of section 5, it is said : … On such a view, the claim that all languages have words (Radford et al. 1999: 145) would be interpretable only in the weaker sense that “all languages have a unit which falls between the minimal sign and the phrase” …
And : … The basic problem remains the same: The units are defined in a language-specific way and cannot be equated across languages, and there is no reason to give special status to a unit called “word”'. …
At beginning of section, 7 : … Linguists have “no good basis for identifying words across languages” …
And in the conclusion, section 10 : … I conclude, from the arguments presented in this article, that there is “no definition of word” that can be applied to any language and that would yield consistent results that are in accord with our writing habits.
Thus, let’s accept that our different regex engines give us an approximate count of the Words characters set !
Note that, on the contrary, the definition of Non-space characters is quite strict, since the Space characters set, that delimit them, consist of only 25 Unicode characters !
BR
guy038