Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello everyone,
can anyone let me know if there is a way to get the count of elements in a word list that I use for a for loop in the way:
for single_result in $results ; do .......
I know I can increment a counter in my for loop, but would there be a way to know the total number of elements in the list without even starting the loop ?
Hope you can help.
Thanks.

Try using awk:

Code:

cnt_elements=$(awk '{print NF}' <<< "$results")

use wc.
wc somefile

I do not seem to be able to use this statement, I am on AIX with ksh88, I don't know about the usability of the <<<. Can you help with more advice?
I did not know you can send a string in input to awk, I thought awk only acts against files, please let me know.
cnt_elements=$(awk '{print NF}' <<< "$results")

@broli suggested wc

Code:

echo $results | wc -c