How to Sort and Count Word Instances in a PHP String?

Sorting and Counting Word Instances in a String in PHP

Sorting and counting occurrences of words in a string is a common task in programming. Fortunately, PHP provides a simple and elegant solution for this problem.

Using str_word_count() and array_count_values()

The str_word_count() function returns an array of all words in a string, while the array_count_values() function counts the number of occurrences of each element in an array. By combining these two functions, we can efficiently count the instances of each word in a string.

<code class="php">$str = 'happy beautiful happy lines pear gin happy lines rock happy lines pear ';
$words = array_count_values(str_word_count($str, 1));</code>

The resulting array, $words, will contain the count of each unique word in $str.

Sorting the Entries

To sort the word counts, we can use the arsort() function, which sorts an array in descending order while preserving the keys.

<code class="php">arsort($words);</code>

This will sort the $words array by the count of each word, with the most frequently occurring word at the beginning of the array.

Printing the Results

Finally, we can loop through the $words array and print the count of each word:

<code class="php">foreach ($words as $word => $count) {
    echo "There are $count instances of $word.<br>";
}</code>

This code will output the following:

There are 4 instances of happy.
There are 3 instances of lines.
There are 2 instances of gin.
There are 1 instance of pear.
There are 1 instance of rock.
There are 1 instance of beautiful.

Additional Notes

The 1 argument passed to str_word_count() indicates that it should return an array of all words, rather than a string.

Sorting the entries is optional, but it can be useful for displaying the data in a more meaningful way.

This solution can be easily adapted to handle other types of strings, such as sentences or paragraphs.

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