Advanced Word Count for PHP!!!!!

If you have tried counting words in a string in PHP, you sure must have used “explode” function.

Its a pretty simple function and can be used in N-ways. A general simple function can be written as

$String = "This is my blog";
$words = explode(" ",String);
$num = count($words);

Now, this should give you the number of words (4) and following with the count of number of words{This, is, my, blog}.

BUT, the real problem is if your string is “Hello     World”, the number of words here are 7 and count is also 7. How come? THats coz, of the fact the function explode takes delimiter as a space and will count the spaces, commas, etc also as words.

I have found a better way of doing the same. So here I am sharing with you.

Instead use this function, in which we check wheather the word is having any integer, charcter etc in it or not. If its a space we can royally ignore it

function wordCount($string){
     $words = "";
     $string = eregi_replace(" +", " ", $string);
     $array = explode(" ", $string);
     for($i=0;$i < count($array);$i++)
   {
         if (eregi("[0-9A-Za-zÀ-ÖØ-öø-ÿ]", $array[$i]))
             $words[$i] = $array[$i];

     }
     return $words;
 }

In this way, we can get the words as the user must have typed omitting the spaces and junk characters.

This function will return you a array of words in the string, and further we can even make it only Words++ to count how many words are there. So this function can actually work for 2 purposes.

1. Count the number of Words in a string
2. Get the words in array

Hope you find this useful.

CHeerz
Shri

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