I have a data frame that looks like this:

```
SentenceID IA_ID      label  dt indx    IA_TYPE count
1     1       This 271    1 non_target     4
1     2         is  98    2 non_target     2
1     3         an 159    3 non_target     2
1     4    example 319    4 non_target     7
1     5         of 284    5 non_target     2
1     6          a 235    6 non_target     1
1     7       data 218    7 non_target     4
1     8      file. 303    8 non_target     5
1     9        The 173    9 non_target     3
1    10       goal 387   10     target     4
1    11         is 155   11 non_target     2
1    12         to 278   12 non_target     2
1    13    extract  97   13 non_target     7
1    14    content 248   14 non_target     7
1    15       from 273   15 non_target     4
1    16   specific 225   16 non_target     8
1    17      cells 119   17 non_target     5
1    18         in 207   18 non_target     2
1    19       this 199   19 non_target     4
1    20    column.  93   20 non_target     7
2     1        The 206   21 non_target     3
2     2      cells 195   22 non_target     5
2     3         to 220   23 non_target     2
2     4         be 247   24 non_target     2
2     5  extracted 368   25     target     9
2     6        for 213   26 non_target     3
2     7       each 215   27 non_target     4
2     8   sentence 386   28 non_target     8
2     9        are 186   29 non_target     3
2    10 identified 137   30 non_target    10
2    11         by 154   31 non_target     2
2    12         an 101   32 non_target     2
2    13         ID 197   33 non_target     2
2    14     number 297   34 non_target     6
2    15         in 344   35 non_target     2
2    16        the 333   36 non_target     3
2    17     second 386   37 non_target     6
2    18    column. 346   38 non_target     7

```

And so on, with the value of "SentenceID" (first column) increasing every few lines when a new sentence begins. I was able to get a character count for each word (i.e. each cell in the column "label") and the total number of characters in each sentence with:

```
data$count <- with(data, nchar(as.character(label)))
sentence.count <- (sqldf("SELECT SentenceID, sum(count) as sentChar FROM data GROUP BY SentenceID"))

```

However, that sentence.count does not include spaces, which I need. Essentially, I would need to add to it "n-1", where "n" is the total number of words in a sentence, or the total number of rows that have each sentence ID (-1 because there is no space to be counted after the final word). I can't seem to figure out the syntax for it, though. All the options I seem to find would work if I were dealing with a single string (i.e. if all the words in "label" were concatenated with spaces), rather than a series of strings in subsequent cells of a column in a data frame. Any ideas?