finding count of spaces in a string

[dpgirago]

We have numerous identical tables with a varchar column that holds data 
like this: "0 0 0 1 0 1 0 25 7 0 139 0 9". Essentially there are a bunch 
of integers with a single space as a separator. There _should_ be no more 
than 30 entries ( and 29 spaces ), but sometimes the system misfires and 
there are more or less.  Is there a MySQL solution to getting a count of 
the spaces present in the field, figuring that spaces + 1 will equal 
entries? It's fairly straight forward using a PHP application, but I'd 
like to get the DB server to accomplish this task. Not having much luck 
finding a solution in the manual. 

Thanks,

David