split() function

I have a textarea and i have to enter a list of tickers like below.....

sss,ffff,gggg,ttttt

(here the count is 4)
then later they have to be written on a file.

the thing is.....

if i have a record something like below....

sss,,fffff, ,gggg,tttttt,


then i have to remove the spaces,extra commas and it should return the count as 4.
if i use split function for the above record , i get the o/p count 6 which is not i watned.

i do i solve the above thing using split??

is there any other method???

Thanks in advance.
Kalpana

You could check each substring returned by split() and if it's a space, you could not count it or not write it to a file.