Best practice for passing a single line of input to a command's stdin using bash

Question

I have a command-line program which takes input from stdin. What's the best way for me to pass a line of stdin into that program using bash? I have two approaches which accomplish the job, but they both seem a bit clunky.

I'll illustrate my approaches using a dumbed-down example of counting three words.

using a here doc:

wc -w <<EOS
one two three
EOS

using echo:

echo 'one two three' | wc -w

As I said, both of these seem a bit clunky. Is there a cleaner way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

wc -w <<<"one two three"

is a shorter way.