A Program That Reads The Amount of words In a Text File

Someone else asked a similar question recently and here's the solution I gave then which uses a regular expression.

This treats words containing hyphens, underscores and apostrophes as single words which I think is what most people would do if they were counting the words 'by hand':

using System;

using System.IO;

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

class Program

{

static void Main()

{

string filePath = "whatever.txt";

string text = File.ReadAllText(filePath);

string regExp = @"\b(\w|[-'])+\b";

int wordCount = Regex.Matches(text, regExp).Count;

Console.WriteLine("The number of words in the file is {0}", wordCount);

Console.ReadKey();

}