I happened to search around everywhere and did not managed to find a solution to count number of sentence in a String using Ruby. Does anyone how to do it?
Example
string = "The best things in an artist’s work are so much a matter of intuition, that there is much to be said for the point of view that would altogether discourage intellectual inquiry into artistic phenomena on the part of the artist. Intuitions are shy things and apt to disappear if looked into too closely. And there is undoubtedly a danger that too much knowledge and training may supplant the natural intuitive feeling of a student, leaving only a cold knowledge of the means of expression in its place. For the artist, if he has the right stuff in him ... "
This string should return number 4.
You can split the text into sentences and count them. Here:
string.scan(/[^\.!?]+[\.!?]/).map(&:strip).count # scan has regex to split string and strip will remove trailing spaces.
# => 4
Explaining regex:
[^\.!?]
Caret inside of a character class [^ ] is the negation operator. Which means we are looking for characters which are not present in list: ., ! and ?.
+
is a greedy operator that returns matches between 1 and unlimited times. (capturing our sentences here and ignoring repetitions like ...)
[\.!?]
matching characters ., ! or ?.
In a nutshell, we are capturing all characters that are not ., ! or ? till we get characters that are ., ! or ?. Which basically can be treated as a sentence (in broad senses).