Counting Strings Help!

Anon

I'd like to open a text file using PHP, which I know how to do, and count
the number of instances of a string, which I don't know how to do! There are
in particular 6 types of string. I'd like to count the total of each and use
each total to form the data for a graph .

Is my methodology correct? ie. opening up the file first and then reading
from it? Or is there a more elegant way?
How do I count the total number of occurances for each string?

Thanks in advance

PS. I have looked up count() and sizeof() but they're not quite what I'm looking
for (I think?!) ... I've also looked up substr_count on the annotated manual
but unfortunately I'm on PHP3 and no likelihood to have PHP4 for some time.
The annotated manual does in fact have a user contributed function outlined
as an alternative, but unfortunately it has a bug.

Anon

Try this, not sure if it will work, or even what you are looking for:
Open the text file. Get the contents inside of an array, by using the explode funtion, and seperating it by whitespace like this:
$newArray = explode(" ", $fileContents);

Next to a loop thru it:

$wordCount = 0;
for($i = 0; $i < sizeOf($newArray); $i++)
{
if(strchr($$newArray[$i], "whatyourlookingfor")
{
$wordCount++;
}
}

$wordCount should have the number of times that string was found. The strchr function will look for the string in any form. Like this:
Say the string you were looking for is: this
If there is: thi or is or any combination of thi or his or is. then it will return true. You can modify this.
Hope this helps.
Bill

Anon

This is on the right track, but it won't count correctly if the target string occurs more than once on a line. Amir's original problem statement doesn't specify whether or not the string should match across line breaks. Either one of these creates lots of additional complications...

Anon

Hi guys, thanks for your replies and apologies for any incoherence in my original posting.

My aim was to do this: To open a text file called 'log.txt', which contains a series of strings like 'a1 a2 a2 a1 a2' on new lines. I wanted to count these and pull out the total occurances of each.

Someone on IRC Dalnet #php came up with the following solution which does the job:

<?php

$filename = "../log.txt";
$fp = fopen($filename,"r");

$haystack = fread($fp,filesize($filename));

$needle1 = "a1";
$needle2 = "a2";

$num_occurs1 = count(explode($needle1,$haystack)) - 1;
$num_occurs2 = count(explode($needle2,$haystack)) - 1;

$total1 = $num_occurs1;
$total2 = $num_occurs2;

I could not use substr_count because I do not have PHP4 and not likely to have it on my ISP until a few months time.

The above gives me exactly what I want, the totals I can use to plot my graph.

Many thanks

Anon

That's a pretty interesting solution!