How to count words (and characters)

[aas1611]

Hi,

Is there such a function that counts words and/or characters from a content of a variable?

For example I have a variable:

$text ="Have a nice day."
(of course, the actual content comes from a MySQL field).

The word count function would return 4, and the character count function would return 15.

Or is there another way to do this? in MySQL perhaps?

Thanks for all the hints.

Andre

 

[vacunita]

Look up [blue]strlen()[/blue]

and [blue]str_word_count()[/blue]

in PHP's online manual. at php.net.

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[aas1611]

Here is the problem:

The text I want to count is originally an HTML text. I want to count the characters without the HTML tags. That's why I have to get rid of the '<' and '>' first. But it still doesn't work.

For example, here is my PHP code:

$Html = "<p>Have a nice day</p>";

// this function is to strip the HTML tags away
function parse2($Html) {
   while ($startpoint = strpos($Html, "<", 0)):
      $stop = strpos($Html, ">", $startpoint) + 1;
      $Html = substr($Html,0, $startpoint) . substr ($Html, $stop);
    endwhile;
    return $Html;
}
$parsedtext4= parse2($Html);

echo $parsedtext4;
echo "<br>";
echo strlen($parsedtext4);

At echo $parsedtext4, it returns: Have a nice day
At echo strlen($parsedtext4), it returns: 22 (instead of 15), because obviously it counts the tags also.

Is there a way to count the string without the HTML tags?

Please help!! Thanks!

Andre

 

[jpadie]

your while loop is incorrectly phrased. try this instead

while (($startpoint = strpos($Html, "<", 0)) !== FALSE):

 

[Vragabond]

How about running strip_tags() on the string first and then count?

 

[aas1611]

Hello again jpadie!

it works now, with the new "while" you just gave me. But the while loop here

while ($startpoint = strpos($Html, "<", 0)):

you also gave me in thread434-1193702.

So what is the difference?

Vragabond,
strip_tags() also looks promising, I've read the explanation from php.net. Haven't tried it, though, since it already works, thanks to jpadie.

Thanks!

Andre

 

[jpadie]

curious! and embarrassing

the problem was the equals sign. strpos was returning a zero as it found the needle at position zero. thus was failing immediately.

the revised code above is better as it properly tests for FALSE rather than zero.

sorry ...

 

[aas1611]

I see...


So, !== FALSE means TRUE, is that right?

Double negative always confuses me sometimes...

Thanks again for your help!


Andre

 

[jpadie]

So, !== FALSE means TRUE, is that right?

umm ... no! !== FALSE can mean true but it can also mean anything that is not boolean and equal to false. eg an alphanumeric, a numeral, boolean true, an array, an object etc.

 

[aas1611]

Alright, thanks a bunch!