Mysql Results and array manipulation - php

Question

I am stuck working on a problem, and would appreciate some guidance. I am working with an old system that was coded awfully, and didnt do any validating, or sanitzing of user input, so the database I'm working with is a bit missy.
I have issues with one column called "tags", used for tags for articles. But each row appears like this, and varies between them:
tag tag1 tag2 tag3
OR
tag1, tag2, tag
But I need to combine them and put them into an array that lists them by how many times each one occurs, like this:
tag(2)
tag1(2)
tag2(2)
tag3(1)
Because I'm not the most astute with php, Im not sure if I am going about the problem correctly?
Im new to manipulating arrays on this scale which is why I am stuck at this point. You can view the example below of what I am doing below:
$sql = "SELECT tags, approved FROM articles WHERE approved = '1' ";
$result = mysql_query($sql);
while( $rows = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) {
$arr = $rows['tags'];
$arr = str_replace(", ", " ", $arr); // attempting to clean up the data, so that each word appends with a space.
$arr = str_replace(" ", " ", $arr);
// Don't know what to do next, or if this is even the right way to do it.
}
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks, Lea

Answer 1

Maybe this will be helpful. Modified your code to have a $tagArr for each query. If you need an overall array of tags it would be a bit different, but could easily be coded using the following.
while( $rows = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) {
$arr = $rows['tags'];
$arr = str_replace(", ", " ", $arr); // attempting to clean up the data, so that each word appends with a space.
// Don't know what to do next, or if this is even the right way to do it.
$tagArr = array();
$current_tags = explode(" ", $arr);
foreach($current_tags as $tag) {
if(!array_key_exists($tag, $tagArr)) {
$tagArr[$tag] = 1;
} else {
$tagArr[$tag] = $tagArr[$tag]++;
}
}
// now $tagArr has the tag name as it's key, and the number of occurrences as it's value
foreach($tagArr as $tag => $occurrences) {
echo $tag . '(' . $occurrences . ')<br />';
}
}