Question

I have an array of tags taken from a MySQL database. Obviously, these tags are strings and are stored in an array, with one element in the array storing each tag. TO build my tag cloud, I want to be able to count the occurrences of each tag to find the most common tag.

For example, if I have the table below…

tag1
tag1
hi
bye
gnu
tux
tag1
tux
tux
tag1
...
etc

… the most commonly occurring tag is “tag1” what I want to do is count how many times that tag occurs in the array. Max() doesn’t help here due to it only liking numerical values.

Answer 1

use array_count_values

<?php
$array = array(1, "hello", 1, "world", "hello");
print_r(array_count_values($array));
?>


Array
(
    [1] => 2
    [hello] => 2
    [world] => 1
)

http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-count-values.php

if you do not want the case-sensitive version use :

$ar = array_count_values(array_map('strtolower', $ar));