Question

how can I count single words appearing in a field of a resultset?

example

id| myfield
1 | pear apple peach watermelon
2 | lime grapes pear watermelon

I want to get 6 because there are 6 unique words

I don’t need a fast query, it is just a statistic calculation that will be executed rarely

thanks!

Answer 1

function uniqueWords ($result, $field) {
    $words = array();
    while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) { /* or something else if you use PDO/mysqli/some ORM */
        $tmpWords = preg_split('/[\s,]+/', $row[$field]);
        foreach ($tmpWords as $tmpWord) {
            if (!in_array($tmpWord, $words))
                $words[] = $tmpWord;
        }
    }

    return count($words);
}