Counting number of characters without spaces between them?

Hi all, It's a warm sunny day and I'm trying to wrap my head around the following: I want to be able to check to see if, in a string, the user has entered too many consecutive characters and not enough spaces. For example they might enter a subject like: "hello world!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! how arrrrrrrrrrrrrrre you today?????!!" Does anyone have a nice technique for checking the following: 1) Count the length of the words in the string, i.e. if there are any words beyond say 20 characters then I need to know what they are so I can flag up a warning. 2) Count the number of punctuation characters vs. alphanumerics - I don't want the exclamation mark syndrome shown above, so I need to set a friendly trade-off limit somehow. Any thoughts appreciated. -- Best regards, Richard Davey http://www.phpcommunity.org/wiki/296.html