My basic approach would be to remove all punctuation, or better: All non-word characters and start counting then: 
s/[^a-z]/ /g;
@words= split ' ';

[download]
Of course this does not take into account:
  1. words that are broken at a line-
    end ;-)
  2. foreign language characters
  3. your definition of a word. Maybe you render ab4711xya word. With this it will be 2.
$\=~s;s*.*;q^|D9JYJ^^qq^\//\\\///^;ex;print

In reply to Re: stripped punctuation by Skeeve
in thread stripped punctuation by thealienz1

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