looking for a better alternative to subst_count

[composer]

As a very amateur coder with only a couple of months experience, I struggled and wrote a script to prevent a smiley flood in a forum. I used substr_count to look for instances of smiley code, but as there were 3 things to look for, substr_count is called 3 times plus an extra call to determine if anyone was posting a code sample, so 4 times in all - which is no doubt extremely inefficient, even though the code works perfectly. As a php beginner, I'm dazzled by the amount of functions available, and I couldn't find an alternative function that could handle 3 searches at once, let alone the 4th.

Could anyone please advise me on a better function that could replace the following statement, and use less overhead

$max_smilies = 10;
if (substr_count($message, ':') + substr_count($message, ';') + substr_count($message, 'B)') > $max_smilies && !substr_count($message, '[code]')) {
// warning code here

Any help would be much appreciated

[devinemke]

what is the exact string that you are searching for? you should store all of the your smiley strings in an array and use that to check your $message string.

[composer]

I'm looking for occurrences of smiley code - 🙂 😉 😐 🙁 😃 :o :p 😎 :@ in a forum post - $message.

As there are a couple of odd ones i.e. 😎 and 😉 I could not just use substr_count($message, ':') hence the extra calls to look for those.

The other problem was users posting script code, that would include similar characters, hence the !substr_count($message, '

')