Counter variable not working? - php

Question

I'm writing a function to count syllables of a word as follows:
function estimate_syllables($word) {
$total_count=0;
foreach($word as $w) {
$syllable_count = count_english_vowels($w);
$total_count += $syllable_count;
}
return $total_count;
}
function count_english_vowels($word) {
static $english_vowels = array('A', 'E', 'I', 'O', 'U', 'Y');
$vowel_count = 0;
$letters = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9]+/i', "", $word);
$len = strlen($letters);
$letters = str_split(strtoupper($letters));
$currPosition = -2;
$prevPosition = -1;
for($i = 0; $i < $len; $i++) {
if (in_array($letters[$i], $english_vowels)) {
if($i != $currPosition + 1) {
if ($letters[$i] == 'E' && $i != ($len -1))
$vowel_count++;
$prevPosition = $currPosition;
$currPosition = $i;
}
}
}
return $vowel_count;
}
I'm really confused: if you pass count_english_vowels a word like water, it reaches the inner loop to the correct syllable twice, yet the counter only reports a 1? Super confused, can anyone figure out what's going wrong?

Answer 1

It's only reporting one because of this:
if ($letters[$i] == 'E' && $i != ($len -1))
$vowel_count++;
$prevPosition = $currPosition;
$currPosition = $i;
There is only one E in water, thus it's only executing $vowel_count++; once. Based on your indenting of this code, I'd assume you need {} brackets around those lines, as without them PHP will only apply the first line after an if without them, so if that code is correct your indentation should look like this:
if ($letters[$i] == 'E' && $i != ($len -1))
$vowel_count++;
$prevPosition = $currPosition;
$currPosition = $i;