Hello all,
I am a college student taking my first programming class, and need help with some parts of an assignment, and was hoping I could get some help here. In the program we're writing, the user is prompted for a string, and then we must delete all extra whitespace between the words (so no trim), as well as making sure the sentence meets the minimum word count.

Here is what I have written for the word counter, but it seems really bulky, and it also doesn't count words if they are proceeded by a comma or other (valid) non-letter character:

//Error for a sentence with too few words.
int wordCountStart = 0;
int wordCount = 1;
char b = sentence.charAt(wordCountStart);
while (wordCountStart < sentence.length())
{
  while ((b == ' ') || (b == '(') || (b == ')') || (b == '.') || (b == '?') || (b == '!') || (b == ',') || (b == '/') || (b == '"') || (b == '[') || (b == ']') || (b == '-') || (b == ':') || (b == ';') ||(b == '\''))
  {
    wordCountStart ++;
    if (wordCountStart == sentence.length()) break;
    b = sentence.charAt(wordCountStart);
  }
  while (Character.isLetter(b))
  {
    wordCountStart ++;
    if (wordCountStart == sentence.length()) break;
    b = sentence.charAt(wordCountStart);
  }
  if (b == ' ')
  {
    wordCount ++;
  }
  
}
if (wordCount < 7)
{
  JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Your sentence needs to contain at least 7 words.", "Error", JOptionPane.ERROR_MESSAGE);
  System.exit(0);
}