A substring is a portion of a string. For example, "hello"
is a substring of the string "Oh hello, how are you?"
and "el"
is a substring of the string "hello"
. Manipulating strings is very common in programming, and working with substrings is often necessary.
The substr_count()
function returns the number of instances of a substring within a string. It takes two arguments, the string to search through—sometimes called the haystack— and the string to search for—sometimes called the needle.
$story = "I was like, \"Dude, like just tell me what you like think because like everyone else is like being totally honest, and like I just want to know what you like think.\" So like I don't know..."; echo substr_count($story, "like"); // Prints: 8
In the code above, we invoked the substr_count()
function, passing in $story
as the haystack and "like"
as the needle. We used echo
to print the returned result—8
, which is the number of times the substring "like"
appears in the $story
string.
Let’s practice!
Instructions
Use echo
and the substr_count()
function to print the number of times the word “really” appears in $essay_one
.
Use echo
and the substr_count()
function to print the number of times the word “obvious” appears in $essay_two
.
Notice that substr_count()
is not concerned with which characters come before or after the string it’s searching for—it will count both “obvious” and “obviously”.