Question

here’s the line of code that I came up with:

function Count($text)
        {    
            $WordCount = str_word_count($text);         

            $TextToArray = explode(" ", $text);
            $TextToArray2 = explode(" ", $text);

            for($i=0; $i<$WordCount; $i++)
            {
                $count = substr_count($TextToArray2[$i], $text);
            }
            echo "Number of {$TextToArray2[$i]} is {$count}";                                                   
        }

So, what’s gonna happen here is that, the user will be entering a text, sentence or paragraph. By using substr_count, I would like to know the number of occurrences of the word inside the array. Unfortunately, the output the is not what I really need. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I assume that you want an array with the word frequencies.

First off, convert the string to lowercase and remove all punctuation from the text. This way you won’t get entries for “But”, “but”, and “but,” but rather just “but” with 3 or more uses.

Second, use str_word_count with a second argument of 2 as Mark Baker says to get a list of words in the text. This will probably be more efficient than my suggestion of preg_split.

Then walk the array and increment the value of the word by one.

foreach($words as $word)
  $output[$word] = isset($output[$word]) ? $output[$word] + 1 : 1;