PHP Word Count Position Of Match In String

Question

I am trying to find out where the position of a string occurs in another string.

I can use strpos but this returns the character position, and I am looking for the word count. For example:

$haystack = 'The letters PHP stand for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP originally stood for. Personal Home Page Tools.';
$needle = 'PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor';
magic_function($haystack, $needle); // This should return 6

If you know where the string is, you could extract before that and use stackoverflow.com/questions/4786802/… — Nigel Ren
– Nigel Ren, Commented May 27, 2020 at 13:40

Frederick Behrends · Accepted Answer · 2020-05-27 13:44:18Z

2

You can do this very simple, like this:

<?php

function magic_function($haystack, $needle){

    $strBeforeNeedle = substr($haystack, 0, strpos($haystack, $needle));
    $wordCount = str_word_count($strBeforeNeedle);

    return $wordCount;

}

$haystack = 'The letters PHP stand for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP originally stood for. Personal Home Page Tools.';
$needle = 'PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor';
echo magic_function($haystack, $needle); // This should return 6

Just extract the string in Front of $needle and count the words. Add a +1 if you want the number of the first word from $needle, or leave as is to get the count of all words in front of it.

answered May 27, 2020 at 13:44

Frederick Behrends

3,09526 silver badges47 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

1 Comment

Chris Haas Over a year ago

str_word_count!!!! A decade of PHP programming and I'm still learning about obscure but helpful string functions that are built into the language. ;)

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

PHP Word Count Position Of Match In String

1 Answer 1

1 Comment

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

1 Comment

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related