slicing and counting words in a string

[scidam]

I think you should introduce a special flag, that will indicate beginning of a word. I began to write the code, but since this is an assignment, I pasted it partially:

import string

words = input('Enter a series of words separated by spaces: ')
 
print('The length of the input string is ',len(words))


current_word = ''
container = []
for j in words:
    word_beginning_flag = j in string.ascii_letters # you can define string.ascii_letters manually instead

    if word_beginning_flag:
        current_word += j

    if j not in string.ascii_letters:
        word_beginning_flag = False

# ....................