How to check how many times something occurs in a string in PHP

Question

I want to check how many instances of the letter a appears in a certain string.

What is the function for this? I need it to return an integer value.

Answer 1

I suppose substr_count could do the trick ;-)

For example, this portion of code :

$str = 'abcdazerty';
echo substr_count($str, 'a');

would get you the following output :

2

And, quoting :

int substr_count  (  string $haystack  ,  
    string $needle  [,  int $offset = 0  
    [,  int $length  ]] )

substr_count() returns the number of times the needle substring occurs in the haystack string. Please note that needle is case sensitive.