Is there any way to count how many times a specific word comes up in a txt file?

[last1here]

The title says it all. Thanks in advance.

[themarty]

search the manual for string functions.
and if they're not powerfull enough you can always use regular expressions
(something like this:

$str = "to be or not to be";
preg_match_all("/\bbe\b/i", $str, $matches);
echo count($matches[0]); 

)

[NogDog]

Should be pretty straight-forward with something like what themarty suggested. Where it can get kind of "messy" is if you search for "play", for instance, and whether or not you want to find "plays", "played", and "playing" yet might not want to match on "playbill".

[last1here]

my php knowledge is basic so could you expand more, thanks

[NogDog]

my php knowledge is basic so could you expand more, thanks

It's not so much a question of PHP knowledge (at this point) as it is deciding what your exact functional requirements are. Do you only want to match exact words, or do you want to match if the search word is contained within a larger word -- or something more complex such as matching only with certain suffixes such as "s", "es", "er", "ed" or "ing"? Should the searching be case-insensitive? Is there some other requirement I haven't thought of?

Once you nail down the exact functional requirements, it's then much easier to come up with an exact coding solution.

[last1here]

I would only like to find exact words. The reason i want to find exact words is because i have a download counter that outputs into a .txt document and i would like to display how many times something has been downloaded.

Eg. say i have a file called example.zip every time somebody downloads it it adds a line to the txt file saying: example.zip and the date.

so i wanted to see how many times it says example so i can say how many times its been downloaded.

[themarty]

If you can make a database connection is would be much wiser to store this information there instead of a text-file.
also be careful with your concept of words. if someone downloads example.zip and example.txt (or even Example.zip) you probably don't want to count them as hits belonging to one and the same file

[NogDog]

I would only like to find exact words. The reason i want to find exact words is because i have a download counter that outputs into a .txt document and i would like to display how many times something has been downloaded.

Eg. say i have a file called example.zip every time somebody downloads it it adds a line to the txt file saying: example.zip and the date.

so i wanted to see how many times it says example so i can say how many times its been downloaded.

themarty's solution in the first reply should do the job then. (Remove the "i" after the final "/" of the regular expression if you want the matching to be case-sensitive.)

[last1here]

If you can make a database connection is would be much wiser to store this information there instead of a text-file.
also be careful with your concept of words. if someone downloads example.zip and example.txt (or even Example.zip) you probably don't want to count them as hits belonging to one and the same file

I did what you said and made a db connection and just out putted the data that way.

Thanks themarty & NogDog

[themarty]

i hope you are generating the results using a query now.
just to be sure, you can now do something like this:

SELECT
	COUNT(*) AS total, filename
FROM downloads
GROUP BY filename