PHP: Extract word from string and get word count - php

Question

I have tried for hours to figure this out, to no avail. I have searched and searched, with a lot of results saying to use an array. I can not use an array as this has not been covered in my class yet. Here is what I am to do:
I am to use a for loop to examine the characters using index variable.
When a blank character is found, this indicated the end of the word.
I then need to extract the word from the string and increment the word count, thus printing the word count and extracted word, continuing til the end of the sentence.
Then printing the total word count.
What I am stuck on is extracting the word. Here is what I have so far, which could very well be wrong but I am at my wits end here, so any little bit of push in the right direction would be great.
(Remember, I can not use arrays.)
$stringSentence = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
$wordcount = 1;
$blankCharacter = stripos($stringSentence, " ");
for ($i =0; $i<strlen($stringSentence);$i++)
{
$i. " ". $stringSentence{$i}."<br>";
}
if ($blankCharacter)
{
echo $wordcount++, " ";
echo substr($stringSentence,0,$blankCharacter);
}
Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Have you considered just going through each individual letter to check for spaces and storing in a temporary buffer otherwise? One example:
$stringSentence = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
$buffer = '';
$count = 1;
$length = strlen($stringSentence);
for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++) {
if ($stringSentence{$i} !== ' ') {
$buffer .= $stringSentence{$i};
} else {
echo $count++ . ' ' . $buffer . ' ';
$buffer = '';
}
}
echo $count . ' ' . $buffer;
I'm not putting much explanation into my answer.. sort of a backwards approach of giving you the answer but it's up to you to understand how and why the above approach works.

Answer 2

Since this is home work I can't do it for you but you have an end bracket for one in the wrong place
Have a look at this sudo code and you should be in the right direction.
$blankCharacter = ' ';
for ($i =0; $i<strlen($stringSentence);$i++)
{
if (thisCharacter == $blankCharacter)
{
$wordcount++;
}
}

Answer 3

Arrays aren't that complicated! And a solution is very easy with it:
(Here I just explode() your string into an array. Then I simply loop through the array and print the output)
<?php
$stringSentence = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
$words = explode(" ", $stringSentence);
foreach($words as $k => $v)
echo "WordCount: " . ($k+1) . "| Word: $v<br>";
echo "Total WordCount: " . count($words);
?>
output:
WordCount: 1| Word: The
//...
WordCount: 9| Word: dog
Total WordCount: 9
If you want to read more about arrays see the manual: http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.array.php
EDIT:
If you can't use arrays, just use this:
Here I just loop through all characters of the sentence to check if it is either a space OR the end of the string. If the condition is true I print the word count + the substr from the last space until the current one. Then I also increment the word count with 1. At the end I simply print the total word count (note that I subtracted 1, because the last word will also add 1 to the count which is too much).
<?php
$stringSentence = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
$wordcount = 1;
$blankCharacter = 0;
for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($stringSentence); $i++) {
if($stringSentence[$i] == " " || $i+1 == strlen($stringSentence)) {
echo "WordCount: $wordcount | Word: " . substr($stringSentence, $blankCharacter, $i-$blankCharacter+1) . "<br>";
$blankCharacter = $i;
$wordcount++;
}
}
echo "Total WordCount: " . ($wordcount-1);
?>