PHP echo number of instances if specific word?

make a while loop that goes through the contents of the array. prior to the array define a counting variable and give it the value 0. during each loop, increase the value by 1 if the word “and” is encountered

you could also make a foreach-loop

$contents = array(‘and’, ‘and’, ‘and’, ‘and’, ‘lol’, ‘and’);

$x=0;

foreach ($contents as $word) {
if($word == “and”)
{
$x=$x+1;
}
}
echo $x;

I think a simpler approach would be to just scan over the string itself rather than exploding it into an array and manipulating the array. For example, strpos() to find the first “and”, use that as an offset in strpos() to find the second “and”, use that as an offset to find the third “and”, etc.

Or there’ s always: shell_exec(‘grep and foo.txt | wc -w’)
;)

@phoenyx its for a class so it needs to be done in a certain method, so im stuck exploding it.

but ive managed to get it to work. thanks for inputs

I’ll bet you get bonus points for adding @phoenyx’ solution, just hand in both solutions. You could also go for a regular expression, although I doubt that would be very efficient.

PHP has a function called substr_count that’s specifically for this purpose

echo ‘and occurs ’ . substr_count($content, ’ and ’) . ’ times.’;

documentation here