Need help counting Multi-Dimensional Arrays

2hawks

Greetings.

I have been attempting to count how many array elements are in the pattern returned to me by preg_match_all(). All I get is 1 for my effort. can someone shed a little light on my code please?

I figured I might be able to use a while statement, but like to avoid those, Which is faster, For(){}, or while(){}?

2Hawks.

########
The Code:

preg_match_all("/[0-9]+<\/td>/", $contents, $hits);
$count=count($hits);

echo "<br>Total Phrases: $count <br>";

// once we have the count we can make the below a loop.
echo "<br>1. ".$hits[0][0]." ".$phrase[0][0]."\n";
echo "<br>2. ".$hits[0][1]." ".$phrase[0][1]."\n";

bubblenut

you need to do something like

<?php
//this will give you the number of regex parts there are
$count_p=count($matches);
//this will give you the number of times the whole regex matched
$count_n=count($matches[0]);
//this will give you the total number of elements in you array
$count=$count_p*$count_n;
?>

RE: Which is faster, while or for?
There is really not much in it at all. You would do far better to to look at real bottlenecks in your code.
HTH
Bubble

Weedpacket

You might also want to look into the uses of [man]preg_match_all[/man]'s PREG_PATTERN_ORDER and PREG_SET_ORDER flags. The default behaviour is to use PREG_PATTERN_ORDER, while PREG_SET_ORDER swaps the two dimensions of the resulting array. Using PREG_SET_ORDER will mean count($hits) gives the number of matches (strictly, the number of substrings that matched the entire pattern, which is what you want).