How to count the number of words in a sentence, ignoring numbers, punctuation and whitespace?

How would I go about counting the words in a sentence? I'm using Python.

For example, I might have the string:

string = "I     am having  a   very  nice  23!@$      day. "

That would be 7 words. I'm having trouble with the random amount of spaces after/before each word as well as when numbers or symbols are involved.

str.split() without any arguments splits on runs of whitespace characters:

>>> s = 'I am having a very nice day.'
>>> 
>>> len(s.split())
7

From the linked documentation:

If sep is not specified or is None, a different splitting algorithm is applied: runs of consecutive whitespace are regarded as a single separator, and the result will contain no empty strings at the start or end if the string has leading or trailing whitespace.

You can use regex.findall():

import re
line = " I am having a very nice day."
count = len(re.findall(r'\w+', line))
print (count)

s = "I     am having  a   very  nice  23!@$      day. "
sum([i.strip(string.punctuation).isalpha() for i in s.split()])

The statement above will go through each chunk of text and remove punctuations before verifying if the chunk is really string of alphabets.

This is a simple word counter using regex. The script includes a loop which you can terminate it when you're done.

#word counter using regex
import re
while True:
    string =raw_input("Enter the string: ")
    count = len(re.findall("[a-zA-Z_]+", string))
    if line == "Done": #command to terminate the loop
        break
    print (count)
print ("Terminated")