Question

I am stuck working on a problem, and would appreciate some guidance. I am working with an old system that was coded awfully, and didnt do any validating, or sanitzing of user input, so the database I’m working with is a bit missy.

I have issues with one column called “tags”, used for tags for articles. But each row appears like this, and varies between them:

tag tag1 tag2 tag3

OR

tag1, tag2, tag

But I need to combine them and put them into an array that lists them by how many times each one occurs, like this:

• tag(2)
• tag1(2)
• tag2(2)
• tag3(1)

Because I’m not the most astute with php, Im not sure if I am going about the problem correctly?

Im new to manipulating arrays on this scale which is why I am stuck at this point. You can view the example below of what I am doing below:

  $sql = "SELECT tags, approved FROM articles WHERE approved = '1' ";
  $result = mysql_query($sql);

 while( $rows = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) { 
  $arr = $rows['tags'];
  $arr = str_replace(", ", " ", $arr); // attempting to clean up the data, so that each word appends with a space.
  $arr = str_replace(" ", " ", $arr);

  // Don't know what to do next, or if this is even the right way to do it.

}

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks, Lea

Answer 1

Maybe this will be helpful. Modified your code to have a $tagArr for each query. If you need an overall array of tags it would be a bit different, but could easily be coded using the following.

while( $rows = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) { 
  $arr = $rows['tags'];
  $arr = str_replace(", ", " ", $arr); // attempting to clean up the data, so that each word appends with a space.

  // Don't know what to do next, or if this is even the right way to do it.

  $tagArr = array();
  $current_tags = explode(" ", $arr);
  foreach($current_tags as $tag) {
    if(!array_key_exists($tag, $tagArr)) {
      $tagArr[$tag] = 1;
    } else {
      $tagArr[$tag] = $tagArr[$tag]++;
    }
  }

  // now $tagArr has the tag name as it's key, and the number of occurrences as it's value
  foreach($tagArr as $tag => $occurrences) {
    echo $tag . '(' . $occurrences . ')<br />';
  }
}