Question

I need help sorting and counting instances of the words in a string.

Lets say I have a collection on words:

happy beautiful happy lines pear gin happy lines rock happy lines pear

How could I use php to count each instance of every word in the string and output it in a loop:

There are $count instances of $word

So that the above loop would output:

There are 4 instances of happy.

There are 3 instances of lines.

There are 2 instances of gin….

Answer 1

Use a combination of str_word_count() and array_count_values():

$str = 'happy beautiful happy lines pear gin happy lines rock happy lines pear ';
$words = array_count_values(str_word_count($str, 1));
print_r($words);

gives

Array
(
    [happy] => 4
    [beautiful] => 1
    [lines] => 3
    [pear] => 2
    [gin] => 1
    [rock] => 1
)

The 1 in str_word_count() makes the function return an array of all the found words.

To sort the entries, use arsort() (it preserves keys):

arsort($words);
print_r($words);

Array
(
    [happy] => 4
    [lines] => 3
    [pear] => 2
    [rock] => 1
    [gin] => 1
    [beautiful] => 1
)