PHP - Count total words in a regex pattern

This is extremely ugly, but maybe you can use some of the logic? It seams to work.

I basicly split the string into 2 different strings. $first_string is the part between the parentheses (). I explode this string on | and count the whitespaces in the new string +1.

The second part of the string $second_string I simply strip out all non alphabetic chars and double whitespaces and count the words.

Finaly I add $first_string + $second_string to get the final result.

One weakness to this is if you have a string with (something | something else), I don't think my method of counting whitespaces can handle different amounts of words on each site of the |.

<?php

    $string='/^(my|the) name is (\w+)$/';
    $pattern='/\(([^\)]+)\)/'; // Get text between ()
    $pattern2 = '([^a-zA-Z0-9 $])'; // all non alphabetic chars except $

    preg_match($pattern,$string, $first_string); // get text
    $first_string=explode('|', $first_string[0]); 

    $new_string = preg_replace($pattern, '', $string);
    $new_string2 = preg_replace($pattern2, '', $new_string);
    $new_string2 = removeWhiteSpace($new_string2);

    // count words
    $first_string=substr_count($first_string[0]," ")+1;
    $second_string = sizeof(explode(" ", $new_string2)); // count words

    // removes double white space
    function removeWhiteSpace($text)
    {
        $text = preg_replace('/[\t\n\r\0\x0B]/', '', $text);
        $text = preg_replace('/([\s])\1+/', ' ', $text);
        $text = trim($text);
        return $text;
    }

    echo $first_string+$second_string; // final result


?>

Decided to give it a go myself and there are a ton of problems with this concept. Here's a couple:

/^(tell me|hey what is) your name$/

A correct answer would be both 4 and 5 words - presenting inconsistency.

/^hey what (.+) up to$/

What happens in this instance? The parenthesis could contain any number of potential words.

So, all in all, the idea of a function to detect a definitive answer was, perhaps, pretty silly ^o^

Nevertheless, I gave it a shot and here's what I came up with, incompatible with (.+) and fairly untested, unleash the horror...

/**
 * Try to detect min/max amount of words in the given pattern.
 *
 * @param string $pattern
 * @param string $or_words_pattern
 * @param string $unwanted_pattern
 * @return array
 */
function regex_word_count(
    $pattern, 
    $or_words_pattern = '/\((\w|\s|\|)+\)/',
    $unwanted_pattern = '/[^a-zA-Z0-9\|\(\)\s]/')
{
    $result = ['min' => 0, 'max' => 0];
    $pattern = str_replace('\s', ' ', $pattern);
    $pattern = preg_replace($unwanted_pattern, null, $pattern);

    if (preg_match_all($or_words_pattern, $pattern, $ors)) {
        $matches = current($ors);

        foreach ($matches as $match) {
            $strings = explode('|', $match);

            foreach ($strings as $string) {
                $counts[$match][] = count(explode(' ', $string));
            }
        }

        foreach ($counts as $count) {
            $result['min'] += min($count);
            $result['max'] += max($count);
        }

        $pattern = trim(preg_replace($or_words_pattern, null, $pattern));
        $pattern = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $pattern);
    }

    if (!empty($pattern)) {
        $count = count(explode(' ', $pattern));
        $result['min'] += $count;
        $result['max'] += $count;
    }

    return $result;
}

Example:

$x = regex_word_count('/^(a{3}) ([abc]) (what is the|tell me) your (name|alias dude)$/');

die(var_dump($x));

// array(2) {
//   'min' =>
//   int(6)
//   'max' =>
//   int(8)
// }

It was a fun exercise of trying to do something, well, impossible.