Can regex match all the words outside quotation marks?

Question

I recently typed an essay for my lit class, and my teacher specifically stated a word limit that does not include quotations from the piece. And I thought, why not make a script that calculates that for you? I could, of course, do this the boring way by going though the whole text and ignoring the words inside quotation marks, but I have a feeling that there's a neater way using Regex and Array.count. As I know next to nothing about Regex, can someone help me/tell me that it's impossible with Regex?

Tl;dr: use Regex to match all words (or spaces, doesn't matter) that are outside quotation marks from a text, and count the items in the resulting array.

Answer 1

Depending on the requirements, could use The Greatest Regex Trick Ever

"[^"]*"|(\w+)

And count the matches of the first capture group.

\w+ matches one or more word characters.

See test at regex101.com

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Also skip single quoted strings:

"[^"]*"|'[^']*'|(\w+)

test at regex101