how to count the words in a specific string in PHP?

Question

I want to count the words in a specific string , so I can validate it and prevent users to write more than 100 words for example .

I wrote this function but I don\'t

Answer 1

str_count_words has his flaws. it will count underscores as separated words like this_is two words:

You can use the next function to count words separated by spaces even if theres more than one between them.

function count_words($str){

    while (substr_count($str, "  ")>0){
        $str = str_replace("  ", " ", $str);
    }
    return substr_count($str, " ")+1;
}


$str = "This   is  a sample_test";

echo $str;
echo count_words($str);
//This will return 4 words;

Answer 2

There are n-1 spaces between n objects so there will be 99 spaces between 100 words, so u can choose and average length for a word say for example 10 characters, then multiply by 100(for 100 words) then add 99(spaces) then you can instead make the limitation based on number of characters(1099).

function isValidLength($text){

if(strlen($text) > 1099)

     return false;

else return true;

}

Answer 3

Try this:

function get_num_of_words($string) {
    $string = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', trim($string));
    $words = explode(" ", $string);
    return count($words);
}

$str = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet";
echo get_num_of_words($str);

This will output: 5

Answer 4

You can use the built in PHP function str_word_count. Use it like this:

$str = "This is my simple string.";
echo str_word_count($str);

This will output 5.

If you plan on using special characters in any of your words, you can supply any extra characters as the third parameter.

$str = "This weather is like el ninã.";
echo str_word_count($str, 0, 'àáã');

This will output 6.

Answer 5

Using substr_count to Count the number of any substring occurrences. for finding number of words set $needle to ' '. int substr_count ( string $haystack , string $needle)

$text = 'This is a test';
echo substr_count($text, 'is'); // 2


echo substr_count($text, ' ');// return number of occurance of words

Answer 6

This function uses a simple regex to split the input $text on any non-letter character:

function isValidLength($text, $length) {
    $words = preg_split('#\PL+#u', $text, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
    return count($words) <= $length;
}

This ensures that is works correctly with words separated by multiple spaces or any other non-letter character. It also handles unicode (e.g. accented letters) correctly.

The function returns true when the word count is less than $length.