Build a tiny version of the Unix wc -w command. Given a list of lines, return the total number of words (whitespace-separated tokens) across all lines as an integer.
Function signature:
fun countWords(lines: List<String>): Int
Example:
Input: lines = ["hello world", "foo bar baz", ""] Output: 5
The empty string contributes 0 words, "hello world" contributes 2, and "foo bar baz" contributes 3. Total: 5.
Words are separated by one or more spaces or tabs, and leading or trailing whitespace is ignored. A line with no words (empty, or only whitespace) contributes 0, and an empty list of lines gives 0. The input is plain ASCII text.
Iterate over the lines and accumulate the word count. Trim each line first so that an empty or whitespace-only line contributes zero rather than a stray token.
Trim the line, skip it if it's empty, otherwise split on a whitespace regex and take the size:
val trimmed = line.trim()
if (trimmed.isEmpty()) { continue }
total += trimmed.split(Regex("\\s+")).size
The full solution:
class Solution {
fun countWords(lines: List<String>): Int {
var total = 0
for (line in lines) {
val trimmed = line.trim()
if (trimmed.isEmpty()) { continue }
total += trimmed.split(Regex("\\s+")).size
}
return total
}
}
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