Question

Does anybody have a regular expression that would work to limit the number of words in a response? For instance, I’d like to use it with jQuery validate so I can restrict a textbox/textarea to have say 250 words. The boxes will be plain-text.

I’ve done some Googling but none of the ones I’ve found were very good. They mostly centered around doing \b\w+\b but I had trouble getting it work.

Answer 1

Could you try:

^(?:\b\w+\b[\s\r\n]*){1,250}$ 

That would limit to 250 words over multiple lines.

I am afraid that the Alan’s initial proposition:

/^\w+(?:\s+\w+){0,249}$/ 

might be a case of catastrophic backtracking

When nesting repetition operators, make absolutely sure that there is only one way to match the same match

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To allow for basic punctuation, see janksmap‘s answer.

^(?:\b\w+\b[\s\r\n\.\,\?\!]*){0,250}$ 

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For non-Latin script (like Hebrew), see this answer.