title: Using SQL to determine word count stats of a text field
body: <p>I've recently been working on some database search functionality and wanted to get some information like the average words per document (e.g. text field in the database). The only thing I have found so far (without processing in language of choice outside the DB) is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>SELECT AVG(LENGTH(content) - LENGTH(REPLACE(content, ' ', '')) + 1)
  FROM documents
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This seems to work* but do you have other suggestions? I'm currently using MySQL 4 (hope to move to version 5 for this app soon), but am also interested in general solutions.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>
  
  <p>* I can imagine that this is a pretty rough way to determine this as it does not account for HTML in the content and the like as well. That's OK for this particular project but again are there better ways?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update:</strong> To define what I mean by "better": either more accurate, performs more efficiently, or is more "correct" (easy to maintain, good practice, etc). For the content I have available, the query above is fast enough and is accurate for this project, but I may need something similar in the future (so I asked).</p>