to count words after converting a msword document to plain text with antiword, you can use this function:

<?php
function count_words($text) {
    $text = str_replace(str_split('|'), '', $text); // remove these chars (you can specify more)
    $text = trim(preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $text)); // remove extra spaces
    $text = preg_replace('/-{2,}/', '', $text); // remove 2 or more dashes in a row
    $len = strlen($text);
    
    if (0 === $len) {
        return 0;
    }
    
    $words = 1;
    
    while ($len--) {
        if (' ' === $text[$len]) {
            ++$words;
        }
    }
    
    return $words;
}
?>

it strips the pipe "|" chars, which antiword uses to format tables in its plain text output, removes more than one dashes in a row (also used in tables), then counts the words.

counting words using explode() and then count() is not a good idea for huge texts, because it uses much memory to store the text once more as an array. this is why i'm using while() { .. } to walk the string