Using the split method

Now let's walk through the split method. The split method is a powerful tool that allows you to split a sentence into an array of words or characters. For example, type the following code:

str = "The quick brown fox jumped over the quick dog"  
p str.split 

You'll see that it converts the sentence into an array of words:

This method can be particularly useful for long paragraphs, especially when you want to know the number of words in the paragraph. Since the split method converts the string into an array, you can use all the array methods, like size, to see how many words are in the string.

We can leverage method chaining to find out how many words are in the string, as shown here:

str = "The quick brown fox jumped over the quick dog" 
p str.split.size 

This should return a value of 9, which is the number of words in the sentence:

To know the number of letters, we can pass an optional argument to the split method and use the following format:

str = "The quick brown fox jumped over the quick dog" 
p str.split(//).size 

If you want to see all of the individual letters, we can remove the size method call, like this:

p str.split(//) 

Your output will now look like this:

Notice that it also includes spaces as individual characters, which may or may not be what you want a program to return.

This method can be quite handy while developing real-world applications. A good practical example of this method is Twitter. Since this social media site restricts users to 140 characters, this method is sure to be a part of the validation code that counts the number of characters in a Tweet.