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Counting Words in Alpanumeric Strings

Counting Words in Alpanumeric Strings


str_word_count works great on alaphabetic strings (if you clean the text first) but 

doesn't include numbers (numeric strings). I couldn't use it on a recent project because I 

needed to count numeric strings (phone numbers, etc) as words. 

Default str_word_count 

<? 
// remove excess spaces between words 
$string = ereg_replace("  +"," ","$string"); 
// remove leading and trailing spaces 
$string = trim($string); 
// count number of words 
$numwords = str_word_count($string); 
?> 

The above wass inaccurate for my purpose so to count the number of elements in an alphanumeric string clean the data then create and count an array. 

<? 
$string = ereg_replace("  +", " ",  $string); 
$string = trim($string); 
// count number of words 
$numwords = explode(" ", $string); 
$numwords = count ($numwords); 
?> 

Thanks for all the help, hope I'm giving something back.