Searching String for Accent Characters

[Neumy]

Somehow I feel that I'm missing something easy but I can't seem to find the answers anywhere. The answer might be Regular Expression, but I've never been very good at thinking my way through ereg().

I'm working with Accent Characters (À É Ç Î) and would like to efficiently search through my string and count all the Accent Characters.

The best function I came across was substr_count() but I would need to repeat this function with every Accent Character. Very inefficient.

For example, here are a few typical strings and responces I would like:

"ET COMPATIBILITÉ AVEC" = 1
"POUR ACCROÎTRE L'EFFICACITÉ" = 2
"DIFFICULTÉS FRÉQUENTES" = 2

I hope someone can help - Thanks to anyone that can!

[TheDefender]

It's not that inefficient if you just push it through a foreach loop with your accent characters pre-defined in an array...

$charsarray = array("É", "Î", "Ç", "À");

$teststring[] = "ET COMPATIBILITÉ AVEC"; 
$teststring[] = "POUR ACCROÎTRE L'EFFICACITÉ"; 
$teststring[] = "DIFFICULTÉS FRÉQUENTES";

$count = 0;
foreach($teststring AS $st){
	foreach($charsarray AS $ch){
	    $count += substr_count($st, $ch); 
	}
} 

echo $count;
// Outputs:  5