Word count help

Hello

I am trying to write a piece of code that will count the number of words in a textfield. The part that I am having a problem with is weeding out errors made by the user when they entered the text for instance,

word , word

I do not want the comma in the above text to be counted as a word

Also I want to ignore any time they put in 2 or more spaces between a word.

word word word

I am hoping to get away from doing a find and replace if possible.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.