How to get the length of string and number of words in PHP
In this article, you will learn how to get the length of a string, the number of words it contains, and the number of occurrences a character, word, or phrase appears in a string using PHP.
Getting the length of a PHP string
The strlen() function is used to get the length of a string. It returns an integer value; the length of a string(number of characters and spaces) on success, or 0 if the string is empty.
Syntax
strlen(string)
Example:
<?php
$string = "Hello World!";
$length = strlen($string);
echo $length; //Output: 12
echo "<br>";
$string2 = "I love programming";
$length2 = strlen($string2);
echo $length2; //Output: 18
?>
Getting the number of words in a string
The PHP str_word_count() function is used to get the number of words in a string.
Syntax
str_word_count(string)
Example:
<?php
$string = "Hello World!";
$words = str_word_count($string);
echo $words; //Output: 2
echo "<br>";
$string2 = "I love programming";
$words2 = str_word_count($string2);
echo $words2; //Output: 3
?>
Getting the number of occurrences of a character, word, or phrase in a string
A substring in PHP is a part of a string. It can be a single character, a word, or a number of words.
In PHP, we use the substr_count() function to get the number of times a substring occurs in a string.
Syntax
substr_count(string,substring,start,length)
Parameter Values
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| string | A mandatory parameter that specifies the string to check. |
| substring | Mandatory parameter specifying the text to such for. |
| start | Optional parameter that specifies where to start searching from in the string. If it is negative, it starts counting from the end of the string. |
| length | An optional parameter specifying the length of the search. |
Example:
<?php
$string = "Hello dev! I like web development.";
echo substr_count($string,"dev");
//Output: 2 because "dev" appears twice in the string
echo "<br>";
echo substr_count($string,"dev",0,10);
//Output: 1 because "dev" appears once in the first 10 characters
echo "<br>";
echo substr_count($string,"dev",0,5);
//Output: 0 because "dev" appears doesn't occur in the first 5 characters
?>
Note: This function does not count overlapped substrings.
Example
<?php
$string = "xyzxyzxy";
echo substr_count($string,"xyzx");
//Output: 1
?>
From the above example, though the substring "xyzx" appears twice in the string, it is overlapping and hence can't be counted twice.
Note: The substring is case-sensitive. ABC and abc are two different things.
Conclusion
In this article, you have learned how to get the total number of characters in a string, the number of words, and the number of substring occurrences in a string using PHP.
