Illustrator and scripting inconsistent words[] when tabs used

Tab seems to be considered a character/word when included with other characters (a-z, etc.).

var myDoc = app.activeDocument;
var myTextFrame = myDoc.textFrames[0];
myTextFrame.contents = "a\t\t\t\tb";

alert(myTextFrame.words.length);
// result is 6

Please note, when the textframe is just whitespace (like below), the tab characters are not counted as words...

var myDoc = app.activeDocument;
var myTextFrame = myDoc.textFrames[0];
myTextFrame.contents = "\t\t\t\t";

alert(myTextFrame.words.length);
// result is 0

Except if you separate with them spaces…

var myDoc = app.activeDocument;
var myTextFrame = myDoc.textFrames[0];
myTextFrame.contents = "\t \t \t \t";

alert(myTextFrame.words.length);
// result is 3

And I’m sure there are other weird edge cases. Unfortunately, the API docs don’t detail how AI handles whitespace so you would have to test for all edge cases if you needed this to function correctly in production.

You could count the words yourself with a custom function instead of relying on the `.words` method.

function countRealWords(tf) {
    var s = tf.contents || "";
    var matches = s.match(/[A-Za-z0-9]+(?:['’-][A-Za-z0-9]+)*/g);
    return matches ? matches.length : 0;
}