PHP3 and word count

Anon

Hi,

I'm trying to count the number of space delimited words....

I've found something with PHP4 substr_count sounds like exactly what I'm after...the problem is I've got PHP3

$variable = "this is it"

the output of the function should come back with 3...

please help...

theslinky

One method you could do is explode it into an array and find the size. I think this would consume a bit of memory especially if you have large text files that need word count.

so for example:

$variable = "the is it";

$words = explode(" ", $variable);
$numwords = sizeof($words);

print "The variable has $numwords words";

will this do? I'm pretty sure someone else will have an easier solution, but this works for me :-)

-sridhar

jrottman

$variable = "the is it";

$words = explode(" ", $variable);
$numwords = sizeof($words);
$numspaces = $numwords-1;

print "The variable has $numwords words";
print "The variable has $numspaces spaces";

Just a little more 🙂

[deleted]

Remember that this will fail quite horribly if there is more than one space between the words.

It may be better to use regexps:

preg_match_all('/(\w+)\b/', $string, $aMatches);
echo count($aMatches[1]);

This count the number of times that $string contains a number of word-characters, followed by a word-boundry.
That means you can put spaces in to your hearts content, it will not mess up the count.