Check how many times a word is written

[aQ]

Hey!

 

I am trying to check how many times a word is written in a variable. Lets say I have a story, and want to know how many times "walked" is written. I guess I will need a loop of some kind, but I'm not sure.

 

Thank you.

[GingerRobot]

The substr_count() function should be what you need.

[aQ]

Thanks!

 

I have one more question: How can I replace these words with growing numbers, so that the first "walked" is replaced with 1, the second one 2, 3, 4 and so on?

[chigley]

I doubt you could replace them with the substr_count() function, give this a go:

 

<?php

$story = "My friend once went walking upon a pier, I love walking too!";
$search = "walking";

$words = explode(" ", $story);
$storyout = "";
$count = 1;

foreach($words as $word) {
if($word == "walking") {
  $storyout .= "{$count} ";
  $count++;
} else {
  $storyout .= "{$word} ";
}
}

$storyout = substr($storyout, 0, (strlen($storyout) - 1);

?>

 

Case sensitive, and won't work if the word is next to a comma or anything like that!

 

At least it's a starting point

[jitesh]

substr_count

(PHP 4, PHP 5)

 

substr_count -- Count the number of substring occurrences

[aQ]

There is a parse error on the last line. Seems like a ( or ) is missing?

[chigley]

$storyout = substr($storyout, 0, (strlen($storyout) - 1));

 

My bad

[SammyP]

Try this:

 

echo ReplaceStringWithNumbers("My friend once went walking upon a pier, I love walking too!", "walking");
  
function ReplaceStringWithNumbers($haystack, $needle, $count = 0) {
    
  if (($pos = strpos($haystack, $needle)) !== false)
    return substr($haystack, 0, $pos).($count+1).ReplaceStringWithNumbers(substr($haystack, $pos+strlen($needle)), $needle, $count+1);
  else
    return $haystack;
}

[aQ]

I used sammyP's method. Great function!

 

Thank you all.