Counting the words in a text

[smus]

What if I should count all the words in a text, that is not in a single tag. For example, there are a few <p> tags:

<p>first paragraph</p><p>second paragraph</p><p>third paragraph</p>

function countwords(){
		var p = document.getElementsByTagName("p"), n = document.getElementById("n"), a=[],text = "", count = 0;
		for(var x=0;x<p.length;x++){
		  text = p[x].innerHTML;
		  text = text.trim();
		  a = text.split(" ");
		  al = a.length;
		  count = count + al;	
		}
		n.innerHTML = count;
	}

It works fine if I put a relatively small text. When I put there a pretty long text (around 300 words), the result is not correct.

Does it count double or triple spaces between the words? But MS Word gives even higher result (374 instead of around 360 words).

[dsonesuk]

A better idea would be to strip all tags and assign that! to a variable, trim, then count what's left.

As for MS word count,  It would be hard for it i imagine to distinguish from tags such as span, div, or class, id  attributes and values, from actual words, so it will include those as well.

[smus]

Already solved by changing innerHTML with innerText. Simple and easy