Explode Help

[smurl]

Hi, I have a database with a table called "pictures". People can upload their pictures and the table has a column called "stalkers". Each time a user views a picture, it updates the stalkers column with their username. So the stalkers column might look something like this:

"you,me,him,you,sarah,girl,username,etc"

I want to be able to see how many times each username appears in that column so that I can put at the bottom of the picture's page "Most frequent stalker: Username (number of times viewed picture)" kind of thing.

So far I have:

$queryLatestPictures = mysql_Query("SELECT * FROM pictures LIMIT 12");

while ($Pix = mysql_fetch_array($queryLatestPictures)) {

$stalkers=$Pix[stalkers];
$stalkerExplode = explode(",",$stalkers);

}

Does anyone know how I could do this? Help would be very appreciated.

Thanks 🙂

[visualAd]

You would need to loop through the array and pull each unique user name into a new array, on encountering a duplicate you will update the value for that username. Something like this:

<?php
    $string = 'name1,name2,name2,name4,name1,name5,name11,name6,name7,name7';

$array = explode(',', $string);
$tracking_array = Array();

foreach ($array as $value) {
    if (! array_key_exists($value, $tracking_array)) {
        $tracking_array[$value] = 1;
    } else {
        ++$tracking_array[$value];
    }
}

?>

This is quite a messy way of doing it though. If possible I would recommend that you create a separate table which will keep track of all views for all images and the users who viewed them. You can use an integer ID to to identify the user an the image viewed. This is a suggested implementation:

[size=3]stalkers table[/size]
[b]ViewID[/b]
UserId
PictureId

[size=3]pictures table[/size]
[b]ImageId[/b]
ImageName
ImageLocation

[size=3]users table[/size]
[b]UserId[/b]
UserName
Biobraphy

You can then use a simple query to extract how often an image has been viewed:

SELECT UserName,Count(*) Views FROM