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

substr_count is probably the most straightforward. you can also do this

$str = "I love stackovaerflowa";
print count(explode("a",$str))-1;