How Can I Efficiently Count Occurrences of Specific Values in a PHP Array?

Counting Values in an Array Using Array_count_values

When working with arrays, it's often necessary to count the occurrence of specific values. For instance, consider an array containing both blank and non-blank values:

$array = array('', '', 'other', '', 'other');

The goal is to determine the number of blank values in the array efficiently, especially for larger arrays with hundreds of elements.

Initially, we might consider a simple iteration:

function without($array) {
    $counter = 0;
    for($i = 0, $e = count($array); $i < $e; $i++) {
        if(empty($array[$i])) {
            $counter += 1;
        }
    }
    return $counter;
}

However, this approach can be inefficient for larger arrays. PHP offers a more optimized solution using the array_count_values function. This function takes an array as input and returns an array with keys representing the values from the input array and values representing the count of each value.

$counts = array_count_values($array);

The result would be:

array(
    '' => 3,
    'other' => 2
)

To count the number of blank values, simply access the corresponding key:

$blank_count = $counts[''];

This approach is significantly more efficient than the iterative method, especially for large arrays.

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