Question

I want to know how I can allow only five (5) words on text input using PHP.

I know that I can use the strlen function for character count, but I was wondering how I can do it for words.

Answer 1

You can try it like this:

$string = "this has way more than 5 words so we want to deny it ";

//edit: make sure only one space separates words if we want to get really robust: 
//(found this regex through a search and havent tested it)
$string  = preg_replace("/\\s+/", " ", $string);

//trim off beginning and end spaces;
$string = trim($string);

//get an array of the words
$wordArray = explode(" ", $string);

//get the word count
$wordCount = sizeof($wordArray);

//see if its too big
if($wordCount > 5) echo "Please make a shorter string";

should work 🙂