Find most popular strings in a table - php

Question

I am using MyISAM engine with fulltext indexing for storing a list of strings.
These strings can be a single word, or a sentence.
If I want to know how many times string hello appears in my table, I do
SELECT COUNT(*) Total
FROM String s
WHERE
MATCH (s.name) AGAINST ('hello')
I would like to create a similar report, but for all strings. Result should be a list of TOP-N strings that are the most common in this table (top ones most probably are "the", "a", "to" etc.).
Exact match case is pretty obvious:
SELECT name as String, count(*) as Total
FROM String
GROUP
BY name
ORDER
BY total desc
LIMIT *some number*
But it counts only whole strings.
Is there any way to achieve my desired result?
Thanks.

Answer 1

I guess there is no easy way for this. I would create a "statistic table" for this purpose only. One column for words themselves, one column for the number of occurrences. (Primary key on the first column of course.)
For this with a PL/SQL block scanning all strings, and split them for words.
If the string is not found in the statistic table, you insert a new row.
If the string is found in the statistic table, you increase the value in the second column.
This can run for a pretty long time, but after the first run is ready, you only have to check the new strings on insert, perhaps with a trigger. (Assuming you want to use it not once but regularly.)
Hope this helps, I have no simpler answer.

Answer 2

i think if you use the LIKE command will works
select name, count(*) as total from String where name like '%hello%' group by name order by total
let me know

Answer 3

I didn't find any solution with SQL and my Full text index, but I managed to get my desired result by getting all of my strings from DB and processing them on the backend with php:
//get all strings from DB
$queryResult = $db->query("SELECT name as String FROM String");
//Combine all of them into array
while($row = $queryResult->fetch_array(MYSQLI_ASSOC)) {
$stringArray[] = $row['String'];
}
//"Glue" all these strings into one huge string
$text = implode(" ", $stringArray);
//Make everything lowercase
$textLowercase = strtolower($text);
//Find all words
$result = preg_split('/[^a-z]/', $textLowercase, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
//Filter some unwanted words
$result = array_filter($result, function($x){
return !preg_match("/^(.|the|and|of|to|it|in|or|is|a|an|not|are)$/",$x);
});
//Count a number of occurrence of each word
$result = array_count_values($result);
//Sort
arsort($result);
//Select TOP-N strings, where N is $amount
$result = array_slice($result, 0, $amount);