Question

Any regex gurus around here? its driving me crazy.

Say I have this string:
“bookstore books Booking”

I want to count the number “books” appears in this and return the number.

Currently I have this which is not working:

$string = "bookstore books Booking";            
if (preg_match_all('/\b[A-Z]+books\b/', $string, $matches)) {
  echo count($matches[0]) . " matches found";
} else {
  echo "match NOT found";
}

On top of this the “books” inside the preg_match_all should become a $var

Anyone an idea how to count correctly?

Answer 1

It’s actually much simpler, you can use preg_match_all() like this:

$string = "bookstore books Booking";   
$var = "books";      
if (preg_match_all('/' . $var . '/', $string, $matches)) {
    echo count($matches[0]) . " matches found";
} else {
    echo "match NOT found";
}

Or use the function that was made for this purpose, substr_count():

$string = "bookstore books Booking";   
$var = "books";      
if ($count = substr_count($string, $var)) {
    echo $count . " matches found";
} else {
    echo "match NOT found";
}