Using regular expressions to count words

[pplers]

I got a txt file and want to count the words. That's the easy part, but then i wanted also to experiment with the different cases.

For example, replace:
two or more spaces with only one if they are between words
a parenthesis between spaces with a space or a space and a parenthesis
new line with a space
etc

I used preg_replace

[PHP]$a = file_get_contents("$some_file");
preg_replace('/[0-9A-Za-z][\t\t]{2,}[0-9A-Za-z]/', ' ', $a);
preg_replace('/[0-9A-Za-z][\n]{1,}[0-9A-Za-z]/', ' ', $a);[/PHP]
that example should work to replace "hello

hello" with "hello hello", "hello(space)(space)(space)(space)(space)hello " with "hello hello" right ???


what about the rest ???

please help...

[pbmods]

Changed thread title to better describe the problem.

Try using /\b\w\b/.

http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html