Use JavaScript to count words in a string, WITHOUT using a regex

Question

There are many posts on the topic of how to count the number of words in a string in JavaScript already, and I just wanted to make it clear that I have looked at these.

Counting words in string

Count number of words in string using JavaScript

As a very new programmer I would like to perform this function without the use of any regular expressions. I don't know anything about regex and so I want to use regular code, even if it is not the most effective way in the real world, for the sake of learning.

I cannot find any answer to my question elsewhere, so I thought I would ask here before I default to just using a regex.

    function countWords(str) {
      return str.split(/s+/).length;
    }

My overall goal is to find the shortest word in the string.

Answer 1

Seems the question has changed a little but the first link in your post is close. Modified to ignore double spaces:

function WordCount(str) {
   return str
     .split(' ')
     .filter(function(n) { return n != '' })
     .length;
}

console.log(WordCount("hello      world")); // returns 2

No regexes there - just explode the string into an array on the spaces, remove empty items (double spaces) and count the number of items in the array.