Using StringCases and treating certain phrases as single words

Question

My question is about StringCases. When I use this function, each word is separated by a ,. But I want some noun phrases like names of a ministry to be considered single words.

For example, I would like to count the number of words in the next two sentences.

text= "The Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment is 
committed to improving quality of life,access and mobility in a 
clean,safe and sustainable environment.The Ministry strives to create 
an efficient network of roads,railways,waterways and 
airways,effective water management to protect against flooding,and 
improved air and water quality"

StringCases[text, WordCharacter ..]

The result of this function is:

{"The", "Ministry", "of", "Infrastructure", "and", "Environment", 
"is", "committed", "to", "improving", "quality", "of", "life", 
"access", "and", "mobility", "in", "a", "clean", "safe", "and", 
"sustainable", "environment", "The", "Ministry", "strives", "to", 
"create", "an", "efficient", "network", "of", "roads", "railways", 
"waterways", "and", "airways", "effective", "water", "management", 
"to", "protect", "against", "flooding", "and", "improved", "air", 
"and", "water", "quality"}

Each word is separated by a ','. When I count the number of words I get 50, but there are four noun phrases I want to be considered single words:

"Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment"
"quality of life"
"network of roads"
"water management"

So the word count I would like to get is 41. I can create a reference table with all possible combinations of words. Is there a solution for this problem?

Answer 1

You could add the "special" word combinations to the pattern using Alternatives:

specials = Sequence[
  "Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment",
  "quality of life",
  "network of roads",
  "water management"]

StringCases[text, specials | WordCharacter ..] // Length

(* 41 *)

Answer 2

If you just want the count, short & sweet:

StringCount[text, {"Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment", 
  "quality of life", "network of roads", "water management", WordCharacter ..}]

Same form but with StringCases gives you the actual "words", with special cases treated as such.