+def word_count(in_str: str) -> int:
+ """
+ Args:
+ in_str: the string to count words in
+
+ Returns:
+ The number of words contained in the given string.
+
+ .. note::
+
+ This method is "smart" in that it does consider only sequences
+ of one or more letter and/or numbers to be "words". Thus a
+ string like this: "! @ # % ... []" will return zero. Moreover
+ it is aware of punctuation, so the count for a string like
+ "one,two,three.stop" will be 4 not 1 (even if there are no spaces
+ in the string).
+
+ >>> word_count('hello world')
+ 2
+ >>> word_count('one,two,three.stop')
+ 4
+ """
+ return words_count(in_str)
+
+