Counting characters

Bit of a newbie question =\

[xeonaphobe]

Hi there,

Just a silly little problem i'm not entirely sure how to tackle. I'm wanting to search through a string for a certain character and then count the number of times it appears (or return false if it doesn't locate the character).

All suggestions greatly appreciated =)

Neil

[badone]

[php.net...]

[IanKelley]

Regular expressions will work, but if it's a situation where the code could end up in a high traffic application you might want to use strpos() instead:
[php.net ]

[hakre]

my favour: keep the solution as simple as possible. regular expressions using for this task in php is like buying a complete toolbox and the using the screwdriver only. strpos is a nice alternative to regex, but only in specific cases and this is written as a warning in the php docs, too and it will only tell you the position of one character/string within another and not more.

to have this solved by php, just use the function designed for it: substr_count() [php.net]:

substr_count("hello world","l")

will return 3, because "l" exists 3 times in "hello world". i think that is what you asked for.

[xeonaphobe]

ah yes, substr_count() looks like the way to go!

Many thanks :)
Neil