Warning: substr_count(): Empty substring - php

Question

I'm suddenly getting an awful lot of errors saying "Empty substring" referring to line 8
$score3 = substr_count($name_only, $text);
I have no idea what the issue is, this is a search function. Is it empty submission into the search box?
I thought it might be so I made changes in with JS and HTML so isn't possible to submit the search form blank or with just whitespace, but still the error continues.
This is my php, does anything stand out as the source of the issue to anyone with better knowledge than I have?
function search_now($images){
global $text, $scores, $scores2, $scores3, $do_search;
$images2 = array();
foreach ($images as $key => $value) {
$name_only = $value['name'];
similar_text($text, $name_only, $score);
$score2 = substr_compare($name_only, $text, 0);
$score3 = substr_count($name_only, $text);
if($do_search){
if($score<20)
continue;
}
$images2[$key] = $value;
$images2[$key]['score'] = $score;
$images2[$key]['score2'] = $score2;
$images2[$key]['score3'] = $score3;
//$scores[$key] = ($do_search)? $score : $key;
$scores[$key] = $score;
$scores2[$key] = $score2;
$scores3[$key] = $score3;
}
return $images2;
}

Answer 1

That error message is triggered when the second argument for substr_count() is an empty string. If you dump $text I imagine you will find it's an empty string.
Not sure how your snippet relates to the rest of your code but you could include a check in your function...
if ($text == '') {
// handle scoring differently
}