Are there any best practices for ensuring accurate word counting in PHP when dealing with strings that may not be consistently formatted?

When dealing with strings that may not be consistently formatted, one best practice for ensuring accurate word counting in PHP is to use regular expressions to properly tokenize the input string. By using regular expressions to split the string into words, you can account for variations in formatting such as multiple spaces, punctuation, or special characters. This approach allows for a more robust and accurate word count calculation.

$input_string = "This is a    test   string with punctuation!";
$word_count = preg_match_all('/\b\w+\b/', $input_string);
echo "Word count: " . $word_count;