How to count the number of words in a string in PHP ?

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Given a string containing some words and the task is to count number of words in a string str in PHP. In order to do this task, we have the following approaches:

Approach 1: Using str_word_count() Method: The str_word_count() method is used to counts the number of words in a string.

Syntax:

str_word_count(string, return, char)

Example:

PHP

<?php 
// PHP program to count number of 
// words in a string  
    
$str = "  Geeks for Geeks  ";  
    
// Using str_word_count() function to 
// count number of words in a string 
$len = str_word_count($str); 
  
// Printing the result 
echo $len;  
?>

Output

Approach 2: Here the idea is to use trim(), preg_replace(), count() and explode() method.

Step 1: Remove the trailing and leading white spaces using the trim() method and remove the multiple whitespace into a single space using preg_replace() method.

Step 2: Convert the string into an array using the explode() method.

Step 3: Now count() method counts the number of elements in an array.

Step 4: Resultant is the number of words in a string.

Example:

PHP

<?php 
// PHP program to count number 
// of words in a string  
    
// Function to count the words 
function get_num_of_words($string) { 
      $string = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', trim($string)); 
      $words = explode(" ", $string); 
      return count($words); 
} 
  
$str = "  Geeks  for    Geeks  ";  
    
// Function call  
$len = get_num_of_words($str); 
  
// Printing the result 
echo $len;  
?>

Output

Approach 3: Here the idea is to use trim(), substr_count(), and str_replace() method.

Step 1: Remove the trailing and leading white spaces using the trim() method.

Step 2: Convert the multiple white spaces into single space using the substr_count() and str_replace() method.

Step 3: Now counts the number of word in a string using substr_count($str, ” “)+1 and return the result.

Example:

PHP

<?php 
// PHP program to count number 
// of word in a string  
    
// Function to count the words 
function get_num_of_words($string) { 
    $str = trim($string); 
      while (substr_count($str, "  ") > 0) { 
        $str = str_replace("  ", " ", $str); 
    } 
      return substr_count($str, " ")+1; 
} 
  
$str = "  Geeks  for    Geeks  ";  
   
// Function call  
$len = get_num_of_words($str); 
  
// Printing the result 
echo $len;  
?>