Trying to write Javascript code to get word count

Question

I copied code from an internet source and spent hours making adaptations so that my code would compile in Adobe Acrobat XI form Actions.
Nothing I can do will make the script recognize that a character is a space. I need to count spaces so that I can count words.
Finally I gave up and tried to use Replace to replace spaces with some other character that perhaps the program would recognize, but I can't get the Replace method to work either. Well, I can get it to work for the first instance of a space in the string, but not replace all spaces in the string. I have tried the "/text/g" convention and the "text,newtext,"All" convention. Do I really have to write another loop to replace the spaces individually?
It seems so odd that there aren't more simple functions in Java (I'm new to Java) - it's like programming in machine language. And every function I investigate has more than one syntax I guess depending on what version Javascript you are using - and I can't even find out which version of Javascript Acrobat Pro XI is using!
Following is my code - I will be doing something with the wordCount - this is just an initial snippet:
    var f = getField(event.target.name);
    var input = f.value;
    var wordCount = 0;
    if (input.trim.isEmpty){
        wordCount = 0;
    else {
        wordCount = 1;
    for (var i = 0; i < input.length; i++) {
        var ch = input.charAt(i);
        var str = new String("" + ch);
//        if (i+1 != input.length) && (str == " ") && (!("" + input.charAt(i+1)) = " ")){
        if (i+1 != input.length && str === " " && "" + input.charAt(i+1) !== " "){
            wordCount++;
app.alert (wordCount);

Answer 1

See adracadabraPDF.net and the free utilities they offer. There is a word counter by page and document.
The example from the Acrobat JS API Reference:
Example
Count the number of words in a document
var cnt=0;
for (var p = 0; p < this.numPages; p++)
cnt += getPageNumWords(p);
console.println("There are " + cnt + " words in this doc.");
The above is for the content in a PDF.
If you want to count the words in a form field, you need to determine how you want to split the field value and change certain white space characters to a given character like a space.
You can use the "split()" method to convert  a field value to an array of items based on the "split" character.
If your entry is just a line of text and does not have have any punctuation for string termination you can use
var aWords = event.value.split(" ");
console.println("Number of words: " + aWords.length;