search for a character

nadirah81

Hi....

I'm a newbie. I would like to search for a particular character either in textarea in a form or in a text file.

I have a textarea in a form which user can input their sentences/paragraphs. Each paragraph will start from a character ">". When the user click submit button, the input from the textarea will be saved in a text file. What i want to do is to count the total paragraph in the textarea/file.

1) Do you think it is better to count it before saving it into the text file, or should i count in the text file itself??

2) What function can i use in order to search for that particular character (">")?

Thanks.

vaaaska

Start with http://www.php.net/preg_match/ and be sure to read up on regular expressions.

Weedpacket

1) Count it first, then save. You already have the textarea input before you save it in the file, so you might as well count paragraphs as well.

nadirah81

I'm trying to use preg_match in order to find a character.

What I wanted to do is:
1) trying to find the character ">"
2)if I find a character, then I want to count how many of this chracters found in the string.

My strings are from a textarea in a form.

Here is what I've done, but I couldn't get it to loop to count my character ">".


$k = 0;
$count_preg = array();
$string = $_POST['string'];
$preg = preg_match("/>/", $string);

if ($preg)
{
 $count_preg[$k] = $string;
 $k++;
}

echo "how many of these characters in the string? $k";

pls help.

Weedpacket

[man]substr_count[/man].