Question

Given a text, how could I count the density / count of word lengths, so that I get an output like this

• 1 letter words : 52 / 1%
• 2 letter words : 34 / 0.5%
• 3 letter words : 67 / 2%

Found this but for python

• counting the word length in a file
• Index by word length

Answer 1

You could start by splitting your text into words, using either explode() (as a very/too simple solution) or preg_split() (allows for stuff that’s a bit more powerful) :

$text = "this is some kind of text with several words";
$words = explode(' ', $text);

Then, iterate over the words, getting, for each one of those, its length, using [**`strlen()`**][3] ; and putting those lengths into an array :

$results = array();
foreach ($words as $word) {
    $length = strlen($word);
    if (isset($results[$length])) {
        $results[$length]++;
    }
    else {
        $results[$length] = 1;
    }
    
}

If you’re working with UTF-8, see mb_strlen().

At the end of that loop, `$results` would look like this :

array
  4 => int 5
  2 => int 2
  7 => int 1
  5 => int 1

The total number of words, which you’ll need to calculate the percentage, can be found either :

• By incrementing a counter inside the foreach loop,
• or by calling array_sum() on $results after the loop is done.

And for the percentages’ calculation, it’s a bit of maths — I won’t be that helpful, about that ^^