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str_word_count

(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

str_word_count Devuelve información sobre las palabras utilizadas en un string

Descripción

str_word_count(string $string, int $format = 0, string $charlist = ?): mixed

Cuenta el número de palabras dentro de string. Si no se especifica el format opcional, entonces el valor devuelto será un integer representando el número de palabras encontradas. En el caso en que se especifique format, el valor devuelto será un array cuyo contenido depende de format. Los posibles valores para format y las salidas resultantes están listadas más abajo.

Para los propósitos de esta función, 'palabra' se define como un string dependiente de la configuración regional que contiene caracteres alfabéticos, el cual también puede contener, pero no iniciar con los caracteres "'" y "-".

Parámetros

string

El string

format

Especifica el valor devuelto de esta función. Los valores soportados actualmente son:

  • 0 - devuelve el número de palabras encontradas
  • 1 - devuelve un array que contiene todas las palabras encontradas dentro del string
  • 2 - devuelve un array asociativo, donde la clave es la posición numérica de una palabra dentro del string y el valor es la palabra en sí.

charlist

Una lista de caracteres adicionales los cuales serán considerados como de 'palabra'.

Valores devueltos

Devuelve un array o un integer, dependiendo del format seleccionado.

Historial de cambios

Versión Descripción
5.1.0 Agregado el parámetro charlist

Ejemplos

Ejemplo #1 Ejemplo de str_word_count()

<?php

$str
= "Hello fri3nd, you're
looking good today!"
;

print_r(str_word_count($str, 1));
print_r(str_word_count($str, 2));
print_r(str_word_count($str, 1, 'àáãç3'));

echo
str_word_count($str);

?>

El resultado del ejemplo sería:

Array
(
    [0] => Hello
    [1] => fri
    [2] => nd
    [3] => you're
    [4] => looking
    [5] => good
    [6] => today
)

Array
(
    [0] => Hello
    [6] => fri
    [10] => nd
    [14] => you're
    [29] => looking
    [46] => good
    [51] => today
)

Array
(
    [0] => Hello
    [1] => fri3nd
    [2] => you're
    [3] => looking
    [4] => good
    [5] => today
)

7

Ver también

  • explode() - Divide un string en varios string
  • preg_split() - Divide un string mediante una expresión regular
  • split()
  • count_chars() - Devuelve información sobre los caracteres usados en una cadena
  • substr_count() - Cuenta el número de apariciones del substring

add a note

User Contributed Notes 30 notes

up
36
cito at wikatu dot com
12 years ago
<?php

/***
* This simple utf-8 word count function (it only counts)
* is a bit faster then the one with preg_match_all
* about 10x slower then the built-in str_word_count
*
* If you need the hyphen or other code points as word-characters
* just put them into the [brackets] like [^\p{L}\p{N}\'\-]
* If the pattern contains utf-8, utf8_encode() the pattern,
* as it is expected to be valid utf-8 (using the u modifier).
**/

// Jonny 5's simple word splitter
function str_word_count_utf8($str) {
return
count(preg_split('~[^\p{L}\p{N}\']+~u',$str));
}
?>
up
16
splogamurugan at gmail dot com
15 years ago
We can also specify a range of values for charlist.

<?php
$str
= "Hello fri3nd, you're
looking good today!
look1234ing"
;
print_r(str_word_count($str, 1, '0..3'));
?>

will give the result as

Array ( [0] => Hello [1] => fri3nd [2] => you're [3] => looking [4] => good [5] => today [6] => look123 [7] => ing )
up
1
Adeel Khan
17 years ago
<?php

/**
* Returns the number of words in a string.
* As far as I have tested, it is very accurate.
* The string can have HTML in it,
* but you should do something like this first:
*
* $search = array(
* '@<script[^>]*?>.*?</script>@si',
* '@<style[^>]*?>.*?</style>@siU',
* '@<![\s\S]*?--[ \t\n\r]*>@'
* );
* $html = preg_replace($search, '', $html);
*
*/

function word_count($html) {

# strip all html tags
$wc = strip_tags($html);

# remove 'words' that don't consist of alphanumerical characters or punctuation
$pattern = "#[^(\w|\d|\'|\"|\.|\!|\?|;|,|\\|\/|\-|:|\&|@)]+#";
$wc = trim(preg_replace($pattern, " ", $wc));

# remove one-letter 'words' that consist only of punctuation
$wc = trim(preg_replace("#\s*[(\'|\"|\.|\!|\?|;|,|\\|\/|\-|:|\&|@)]\s*#", " ", $wc));

# remove superfluous whitespace
$wc = preg_replace("/\s\s+/", " ", $wc);

# split string into an array of words
$wc = explode(" ", $wc);

# remove empty elements
$wc = array_filter($wc);

# return the number of words
return count($wc);

}

?>
up
1
MadCoder
19 years ago
Here's a function that will trim a $string down to a certian number of words, and add a... on the end of it.
(explansion of muz1's 1st 100 words code)

----------------------------------------------
<?php
function trim_text($text, $count){
$text = str_replace(" ", " ", $text);
$string = explode(" ", $text);
for (
$wordCounter = 0; $wordCounter <= $count;wordCounter++ ){
$trimed .= $string[$wordCounter];
if (
$wordCounter < $count ){ $trimed .= " "; }
else {
$trimed .= "..."; }
}
$trimed = trim($trimed);
return
$trimed;
}
?>

Usage
------------------------------------------------
<?php
$string
= "one two three four";
echo
trim_text($string, 3);
?>

returns:
one two three...
up
0
uri at speedy dot net
12 years ago
Here is a count words function which supports UTF-8 and Hebrew. I tried other functions but they don't work. Notice that in Hebrew, '"' and '\'' can be used in words, so they are not separators. This function is not perfect, I would prefer a function we are using in JavaScript which considers all characters except [a-zA-Zא-ת0-9_\'\"] as separators, but I don't know how to do it in PHP.

I removed some of the separators which don't work well with Hebrew ("\x20", "\xA0", "\x0A", "\x0D", "\x09", "\x0B", "\x2E"). I also removed the underline.

This is a fix to my previous post on this page - I found out that my function returned an incorrect result for an empty string. I corrected it and I'm also attaching another function - my_strlen.

<?php

function count_words($string) {
// Return the number of words in a string.
$string= str_replace("&#039;", "'", $string);
$t= array(' ', "\t", '=', '+', '-', '*', '/', '\\', ',', '.', ';', ':', '[', ']', '{', '}', '(', ')', '<', '>', '&', '%', '$', '@', '#', '^', '!', '?', '~'); // separators
$string= str_replace($t, " ", $string);
$string= trim(preg_replace("/\s+/", " ", $string));
$num= 0;
if (
my_strlen($string)>0) {
$word_array= explode(" ", $string);
$num= count($word_array);
}
return
$num;
}

function
my_strlen($s) {
// Return mb_strlen with encoding UTF-8.
return mb_strlen($s, "UTF-8");
}

?>
up
0
manrash at gmail dot com
15 years ago
For spanish speakers a valid character map may be:

<?php
$characterMap
= 'áéíóúüñ';

$count = str_word_count($text, 0, $characterMap);
?>
up
0
brettNOSPAM at olwm dot NO_SPAM dot com
22 years ago
This example may not be pretty, but It proves accurate:

<?php
//count words
$words_to_count = strip_tags($body);
$pattern = "/[^(\w|\d|\'|\"|\.|\!|\?|;|,|\\|\/|\-\-|:|\&|@)]+/";
$words_to_count = preg_replace ($pattern, " ", $words_to_count);
$words_to_count = trim($words_to_count);
$total_words = count(explode(" ",$words_to_count));
?>

Hope I didn't miss any punctuation. ;-)
up
-1
brettz9 - see yahoo
14 years ago
Words also cannot end in a hyphen unless allowed by the charlist...
up
-1
charliefrancis at gmail dot com
15 years ago
Hi this is the first time I have posted on the php manual, I hope some of you will like this little function I wrote.

It returns a string with a certain character limit, but still retaining whole words.
It breaks out of the foreach loop once it has found a string short enough to display, and the character list can be edited.

<?php
function word_limiter( $text, $limit = 30, $chars = '0123456789' ) {
if(
strlen( $text ) > $limit ) {
$words = str_word_count( $text, 2, $chars );
$words = array_reverse( $words, TRUE );
foreach(
$words as $length => $word ) {
if(
$length + strlen( $word ) >= $limit ) {
array_shift( $words );
} else {
break;
}
}
$words = array_reverse( $words );
$text = implode( " ", $words ) . '&hellip;';
}
return
$text;
}

$str = "Hello this is a list of words that is too long";
echo
'1: ' . word_limiter( $str );
$str = "Hello this is a list of words";
echo
'2: ' . word_limiter( $str );
?>

1: Hello this is a list of words&hellip;
2: Hello this is a list of words
up
-2
Anonymous
19 years ago
This function seems to view numbers as whitespace. I.e. a word consisting of numbers only won't be counted.
up
-2
php dot net at salagir dot com
6 years ago
This function doesn't handle accents, even in a locale with accent.
<?php
echo str_word_count("Is working"); // =2

setlocale(LC_ALL, 'fr_FR.utf8');
echo
str_word_count("Not wôrking"); // expects 2, got 3.
?>

Cito solution treats punctuation as words and thus isn't a good workaround.
<?php
function str_word_count_utf8($str) {
return
count(preg_split('~[^\p{L}\p{N}\']+~u',$str));
}
echo
str_word_count_utf8("Is wôrking"); //=2
echo str_word_count_utf8("Not wôrking."); //=3
?>

My solution:
<?php
function str_word_count_utf8($str) {
$a = preg_split('/\W+/u', $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
return
count($a);
}
echo
str_word_count_utf8("Is wôrking"); // = 2
echo str_word_count_utf8("Is wôrking! :)"); // = 2
?>
up
-2
dmVuY2lAc3RyYWhvdG5pLmNvbQ== (base64)
14 years ago
to count words after converting a msword document to plain text with antiword, you can use this function:

<?php
function count_words($text) {
$text = str_replace(str_split('|'), '', $text); // remove these chars (you can specify more)
$text = trim(preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $text)); // remove extra spaces
$text = preg_replace('/-{2,}/', '', $text); // remove 2 or more dashes in a row
$len = strlen($text);

if (
0 === $len) {
return
0;
}

$words = 1;

while (
$len--) {
if (
' ' === $text[$len]) {
++
$words;
}
}

return
$words;
}
?>

it strips the pipe "|" chars, which antiword uses to format tables in its plain text output, removes more than one dashes in a row (also used in tables), then counts the words.

counting words using explode() and then count() is not a good idea for huge texts, because it uses much memory to store the text once more as an array. this is why i'm using while() { .. } to walk the string
up
-1
rcATinterfacesDOTfr
21 years ago
Here is another way to count words :
$word_count = count(preg_split('/\W+/', $text, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY));
up
-3
jazz090
15 years ago
Personally, I dont like using this function becuase the characters it omits are sometime nessesery for instance MS Word counts ">" or "<" alone as single word where this function doesnt. I like using this however, it counts EVERYTHING:

<?php
function num_words($string){
preg_match_all("/\S+/", $string, $matches);
return
count($matches[0]);
}
?>
up
-2
joshua dot blake at gmail dot com
17 years ago
I needed a function which would extract the first hundred words out of a given input while retaining all markup such as line breaks, double spaces and the like. Most of the regexp based functions posted above were accurate in that they counted out a hundred words, but recombined the paragraph by imploding an array down to a string. This did away with any such hopes of line breaks, and thus I devised a crude but very accurate function which does all that I ask it to:

<?php
function Truncate($input, $numWords)
{
if(
str_word_count($input,0)>$numWords)
{
$WordKey = str_word_count($input,1);
$PosKey = str_word_count($input,2);
reset($PosKey);
foreach(
$WordKey as $key => &$value)
{
$value=key($PosKey);
next($PosKey);
}
return
substr($input,0,$WordKey[$numWords]);
}
else {return
$input;}
}
?>

The idea behind it? Go through the keys of the arrays returned by str_word_count and associate the number of each word with its character position in the phrase. Then use substr to return everything up until the nth character. I have tested this function on rather large entries and it seems to be efficient enough that it does not bog down at all.

Cheers!

Josh
up
-5
josh at joshblake.net
17 years ago
I was interested in a function which returned the first few words out of a larger string.

In reality, I wanted a preview of the first hundred words of a blog entry which was well over that.

I found all of the other functions which explode and implode strings to arrays lost key markups such as line breaks etc.

So, this is what I came up with:

<?php
function WordTruncate($input, $numWords) {
if(
str_word_count($input,0)>$numWords)
{
$WordKey = str_word_count($input,1);
$WordIndex = array_flip(str_word_count($input,2));
return
substr($input,0,$WordIndex[$WordKey[$numWords]]);
}
else {return
$input;}
}
?>

While I haven't counted per se, it's accurate enough for my needs. It will also return the entire string if it's less than the specified number of words.

The idea behind it? Use str_word_count to identify the nth word, then use str_word_count to identify the position of that word within the string, then use substr to extract up to that position.

Josh.
up
-2
Samer Ata
12 years ago
This is my own version of to get SEO meta description from wordpress post content. it is also generic usage function to get the first n words from a string.

<?php
function my_meta_description($text,$n=10)
{
$text=strip_tags($text); // not neccssary for none HTML
// $text=strip_shortcodes($text); // uncomment only inside wordpress system
$text = trim(preg_replace("/\s+/"," ",$text));
$word_array = explode(" ", $text);
if (
count($word_array) <= $n)
return
implode(" ",$word_array);
else
{
$text='';
foreach (
$word_array as $length=>$word)
{
$text.=$word ;
if(
$length==$n) break;
else
$text.=" ";
}
}
return
$text;
?>
up
-2
philip at cornado dot com
21 years ago
Some ask not just split on ' ', well, it's because simply exploding on a ' ' isn't fully accurate. Words can be separated by tabs, newlines, double spaces, etc. This is why people tend to seperate on all whitespace with regular expressions.
up
-5
aix at lux dot ee
20 years ago
One function.
<?php
if (!function_exists('word_count')) {
function
word_count($str,$n = "0"){
$m=strlen($str)/2;
$a=1;
while (
$a<$m) {
$str=str_replace(" "," ",$str);
$a++;
}
$b = explode(" ", $str);
$i = 0;
foreach (
$b as $v) {
$i++;
}
if (
$n==1) return $b;
else return
$i;

}
}
$str="Tere Tartu linn";
$c = word_count($str,1); // it return an array
$d = word_count($str); // it return int - how many words was in text
print_r($c);
echo
$d;
?>
up
-4
Anonymous
17 years ago
Here is a php work counting function together with a javascript version which will print the same result.

<?php
//Php word counting function
function word_count($theString)
{
$char_count = strlen($theString);
$fullStr = $theString." ";
$initial_whitespace_rExp = "^[[:alnum:]]$";

$left_trimmedStr = ereg_replace($initial_whitespace_rExp,"",$fullStr);
$non_alphanumerics_rExp = "^[[:alnum:]]$";
$cleanedStr = ereg_replace($non_alphanumerics_rExp," ",$left_trimmedStr);
$splitString = explode(" ",$cleanedStr);

$word_count = count($splitString)-1;

if(
strlen($fullStr)<2)
{
$word_count=0;
}
return
$word_count;
}
?>

<?php
//Function to count words in a phrase
function wordCount(theString)
{
var
char_count = theString.length;
var
fullStr = theString + " ";
var
initial_whitespace_rExp = /^[^A-Za-z0-9]+/gi;
var
left_trimmedStr = fullStr.replace(initial_whitespace_rExp, "");
var
non_alphanumerics_rExp = rExp = /[^A-Za-z0-9]+/gi;
var
cleanedStr = left_trimmedStr.replace(non_alphanumerics_rExp, " ");
var
splitString = cleanedStr.split(" ");

var
word_count = splitString.length -1;

if (
fullStr.length <2)
{
word_count = 0;
}
return
word_count;
}
?>
up
-2
Kirils Solovjovs
20 years ago
Nothing of this worked for me. I think countwords() is very encoding dependent. This is the code for win1257. For other layots you just need to redefine the ranges of letters...

<?php
function countwords($text){
$ls=0;//was it a whitespace?
$cc33=0;//counter
for($i=0;$i<strlen($text);$i++){
$spstat=false; //is it a number or a letter?
$ot=ord($text[$i]);
if( ((
$ot>=48) && ($ot<=57)) || (($ot>=97) && ($ot<=122)) || (($ot>=65) && ($ot<=90)) || ($ot==170) ||
((
$ot>=192) && ($ot<=214)) || (($ot>=216) && ($ot<=246)) || (($ot>=248) && ($ot<=254)) )$spstat=true;
if((
$ls==0)&&($spstat)){
$ls=1;
$cc33++;
}
if(!
$spstat)$ls=0;
}
return
$cc33;
}

?>
up
-4
broncha at rajesharma dot com
9 years ago
Turns out the charlist is set by default for the web. For example, the string

Copyright &copy; ABC Ltd.

is 3 words in the cli and 4 words if executing in web context.
up
-4
Artimis
21 years ago
Never use this function to count/separate alphanumeric words, it will just split them up words to words, numbers to numbers. You could refer to another function "preg_split" when splitting alphanumeric words. It works with Chinese characters as well.
up
-3
matthewkastor at live dot com
13 years ago
This needs improvement, but works well as is.

<?php
/**
* Generates an alphabetical index of unique words, and a count of their occurrences, in a file.
*
* This works on html pages or plain text files.
* This function uses file_get_contents, so it
* is possible to use a url instead of a local filename.
*
* Change the search pattern at
* <code> $junk = preg_match('/[^a-zA-Z]/', $word); </code>
* if you want to keep words with numbers or other characters. The pattern
* I've set searches for anything that is not an upper or lowercase letter,
* you may want something else.
*
* The array returned will look something like this:
* <code>
* Array
* (
* [0] => Array
* (
* [word] => a
* [count] => 21
* )
*
* [1] => Array
* (
* [word] => ability
* [count] => 1
* )
* )
* </code>
*
* @param string $file The file ( or url ) you want to create an index from.
* @return array
*/
function index_page($file) {
$index = array();
$find = array(
'/\r/',
'/\n/',
'/\s\s+/'
);
$replace = array(
' ',
' ',
' '
);
$work = file_get_contents($file);
$work = preg_replace('/[>][<]/', '> <', $work);
$work = strip_tags($work);
$work = strtolower($work);
$work = preg_replace($find, $replace, $work);
$work = trim($work);
$work = explode(' ', $work);
natcasesort($work);
$i = 0;
foreach(
$work as $word) {
$word = trim($word);
$junk = preg_match('/[^a-zA-Z]/', $word);
if(
$junk == 1) {
$word = '';
}
if( (!empty(
$word)) && ($word != '') ) {
if(!isset(
$index[$i]['word'])) { // if not set this is a new index
$index[$i]['word'] = $word;
$index[$i]['count'] = 1;
} elseif(
$index[$i]['word'] == $word ) { // count repeats
$index[$i]['count'] += 1;
} else {
// else this is a different word, increment $i and create an entry
$i++;
$index[$i]['word'] = $word;
$index[$i]['count'] = 1;
}
}
}
unset(
$work);
return(
$index);
}
?>

example usage:

<?php
$file
= 'http://www.php.net/';
// or use a local file, see file_get_contents() for valid filenames and restrictions.

$index = index_page($file);
echo
'<pre>'.print_r($index,true).'</pre>';
?>
up
-5
lwright at psu dot edu
18 years ago
If you are looking to count the frequency of words, try:

<?php

$wordfrequency
= array_count_values( str_word_count( $string, 1) );

?>
up
-3
andrea at 3site dot it
21 years ago
if string doesn't contain the space " ", the explode method doesn't do anything, so i've wrote this and it seems works better ... i don't know about time and resource

<?php
function str_incounter($match,$string) {
$count_match = 0;
for(
$i=0;$i<strlen($string);$i++) {
if(
strtolower(substr($string,$i,strlen($match)))==strtolower($match)) {
$count_match++;
}
}
return
$count_match;
}
?>

example

<?php
$string
= "something:something!!something";
$count_some = str_incounter("something",$string);
// will return 3
?>
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-5
eanimator at yahoo dot com
15 years ago
My quick and rough wordLimiter function.

<?php
function WordLimiter($text,$limit=20){
$explode = explode(' ',$text);
$string = '';

$dots = '...';
if(
count($explode) <= $limit){
$dots = '';
}
for(
$i=0;$i<$limit;$i++){
$string .= $explode[$i]." ";
}

return
$string.$dots;
}
?>
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-3
amosbatto at yahoo dot com
3 years ago
//To get an accurate word count in English, some diacritical marks have
// to be added for words like née, Chloë, naïve, coöpt, façade, piñata, etc.
$count = str_word_count($str, 0, 'éëïöçñÉËÏÖÇÑ');

//To get the word count for any European language using a Roman alphabet:
$count = str_word_count($str, 0, 'äëïöüÄËÏÖÜáǽćéíĺńóŕśúźÁǼĆÉÍĹŃÓŔŚÚŹ'.
'àèìòùÀÈÌÒÙãẽĩõñũÃẼĨÕÑŨâêîôûÂÊÎÔÛăĕğĭŏœ̆ŭĂĔĞĬŎŒ̆Ŭ'.
'āēīōūĀĒĪŌŪőűŐŰąęįųĄĘĮŲåůÅŮæÆøØýÝÿŸþÞẞßđĐıIœŒ'.
'čďěľňřšťžČĎĚĽŇŘŠŤŽƒƑðÐłŁçģķļșțÇĢĶĻȘȚħĦċėġżĊĖĠŻʒƷǯǮŋŊŧŦ');
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-4
dev dot vegera at gmail dot com
4 years ago
preg_match_all based function to mimic str_word_count behavior:

<?php
function mb_str_word_count($str, $format = 2, $charlist = '') {
if (
$format < 0 || $format > 2) {
throw new
InvalidArgumentException('Argument #2 ($format) must be a valid format value');
}
$count = preg_match_all('#[\p{L}\p{N}][\p{L}\p{N}\'' . $charlist . ']*#u', $str, $matches, $format === 2 ? PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE : PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
if (
$format === 0) {
return
$count;
}
$matches = $matches[0] ?? [];
if (
$format === 2) {
$result = [];
foreach (
$matches as $match) {
$result[$match[1]] = $match[0];
}
return
$result;
}
return
$matches;
}
?>
up
-5
aidan at php dot net
20 years ago
This functionality is now implemented in the PEAR package PHP_Compat.

More information about using this function without upgrading your version of PHP can be found on the below link:

http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_Compat
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