How to get number of items (length) from a Stata macro?

Question

Say I have a global macro x, how do I extract the number of items (space-separated unquoted words) in it?

global x abc xyz foo

I am sure it is an easy task, but I've looked in help macro and haven't find anything so far.

Answer 1

Yeah, it was right there in the manual. The macro function word count would do the job.

. global x abc xyz foo
. local len_x : word count $x
. di `len_x'
3

Alternatively,

. di wordcount("$x")
3

Note the need to quote the global macro in this case.