I made a word counter. It works as long as there aren't any lone punctuation marks. How could it be improved? (Could it be made simpler? Are the comments detailed/clear enough? etc.) I know it's simple, but I don't want to develop bad habits early on.
#prompt user to input a sentence
toCount = raw_input("--- ")
#function that counts words of inputted sentence
def countWords(theString):
stringLength = len(theString)
#index for each character in string
counter1 = 0
#stores word count
accumulator = 0
#go through each character in input text. if a character is a space
#with no preceding spaces, add 1 to word count.
while counter1 < stringLength:
stringChar = theString[counter1]
if stringChar == ' ' and counter1 > 0 and theString[counter1 - 1] != ' ':
accumulator = accumulator + 1
counter1 = counter1 + 1
else:
counter1 = counter1 + 1
#if last character in input text is not a space, add 1 to word count
if theString[counter1 - 1] != ' ':
accumulator = accumulator + 1
output = "You typed " + str(accumulator) + " words."
return output
print countWords(toCount)