Searching string for entries and tabling those entries

[dink87522]

I have a string that looks like "14, 1, 4, 5, 16, 17, 2, 2, 5, 1, 5, 20, 5" etc but with many more characters (and it may end up with a few thousand characters to it in the end). Each character is between 1 and 20 (inclusive) and separated by ",".

 

I need to search this string and count how many times each number occurs (i.e how many 1's, how many 2's ... how many 20's). I sort of got it working using a for loop and switch statement although it was rather obfuscated.

 

What would be the easiest way to do this?

[Adam]

I'd split the string by the comma and loop through each number, then create or update an array key for that number that stores the count - if that makes sense? Something like:

 

$str = '1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 7, 9, 23, 23';
$numbers = array();

foreach (explode(",", $str) as $x)
{
    $x = trim($x);

    if (!isset($numbers[$x]))
    {
        $numbers[$x] = 1;
    }
    else
    {
        $numbers[$x]++;
    }
}

print_r($numbers);

[dink87522]

Thanks, that got me on the right track.