Question

I'm completely new to Python and coding in general. I am needing to write a code that allows the user to input many lines and when they are finished writing their multiple sentences, they enter a single period to stop the program and the program will then tell the user how many words were inputted. How would I go about doing this?

Here is what I have so far:

print("Enter as many lines of text as you want.")
print("When you're done, enter a single period on a line by itself.")

while True:
    print("> ", end="")
    line = input()
    if line == ".":
        break
    totalWords = line.split()
    newWords = totalWords.append(line)
wordCount = len(newWords)
print("The number of words entered:" , wordCount, "")

Answer 1

You should set content out of loop.

content = []
while True:
    line = input()
    if line == ".":
        break
    words = line.split()
    content.append(words)

words_list = [item for sublist in content for item in sublist]
print(len(words_list))

Besides, Most functions that change the items of sequence/mapping does return None. So newWords = totalWords.append(line) will always return None.