Count number of different strings? - php

Question

I have an array that looks like
Array
(
[1] => Array
(
[0] => Date
[1] => Action
)
[2] => Array
(
[0] => 2011-01-22 11:23:19
[1] => SHARE_TWEET
)
[3] => Array
(
[0] => 2011-01-22 11:23:19
[1] => SHARE_FACEBOOK
)
and many other different values (about 10), what I want to do is I want to count the number of times a string is in the array. I was going to use array_count_values but it doesn't count multidimensional arrays.
Any other options?

Answer 1

This could be done by first flattening the array, and then using array_count_values() on it:
For flattening, here is the trick:
$array = call_user_func_array('array_merge', $arrays);
And then:
$counts = array_count_values($array);
Output:
array (
'Date' => 1,
'Action' => 1,
'2011-01-22 11:23:19' => 2,
'SHARE_TWEET' => 1,
'SHARE_FACEBOOK' => 1,
)
Full code:
$array = call_user_func_array('array_merge', $arrays);
var_export(array_count_values($array));

Answer 2

Any time you're dealing with arrays, especially with loops in PHP I can't string enough suggest you look at the array documentation, You'd be suprised how quickly you realise most of the loops in your code is unnecessary. PHP has a built in function to achieve what you're after called array_walk_recursive. And since you're using PHP5 you can use closures rather that create_function (which can be very troublesome, especially to debug, and can't be optimised by the PHP interpreter afik)
$strings = array();
array_walk_recursive($arr, function($value, $key) use (&$strings) {
$strings[$value] = isset($strings[$value]) ? $strings[$value]+1 : 1;
});
I know, unary statements aren't always clear, but this one is simple enough, but feel free to expand out the if statement.
The result of the above is:
print_r($strings);
Array
(
[Date] => 1,
[Action] => 1,
[2011-01-22 11:23:19] => 2,
[SHARE_TWEET] => 1,
[SHARE_FACEBOOK] => 1,
)

Answer 3

Pseudo Code
$inputArray = // your array as in the example above
foreach ($inputArray as $key => $value) {
$result[$value[1]] = $result[$value[1]] + 1;
}
var_dump($result);

Answer 4

Here is a way to do the job:
$arr = Array (
1 => Array (
0 => 'Date',
1 => 'Action'
),
2 => Array (
0 => '2011-01-22 11:23:19',
1 => 'SHARE_TWEET'
),
3 => Array (
0 => '2011-01-22 11:23:19',
1 => 'SHARE_FACEBOOK'
)
);
$result = array();
function count_array($arr) {
global $result;
foreach($arr as $k => $v) {
if (is_array($v)) {
count_array($v);
} else {
if (isset($result[$v])) {
$result[$v]++;
} else {
$result[$v] = 1;
}
}
}
}
count_array($arr);
print_r($result);
output:
Array
(
[Date] => 1
[Action] => 1
[2011-01-22 11:23:19] => 2
[SHARE_TWEET] => 1
[SHARE_FACEBOOK] => 1
)