Most used words in text with php

Question

I found the code below on stackoverflow and it works well in finding the most common words in a string. But can I exclude the counting on common words like "a, if, you, have, etc"? Or would I have to remove the elements after counting? How would I do this? Thanks in advance.

<?php

$text = "A very nice to tot to text. Something nice to think about if you're into text.";


$words = str_word_count($text, 1); 

$frequency = array_count_values($words);

arsort($frequency);

echo '<pre>';
print_r($frequency);
echo '</pre>';
?>

Answer 1

There's not additional parameters or a native PHP function that you can pass words to exclude. As such, I would just use what you have and ignore a custom set of words returned by str_word_count.

Answer 2

You can do this easily by using array_diff():

$words = array("if", "you", "do", "this", 'I', 'do', 'that');
$stopwords = array("a", "you", "if");

print_r(array_diff($words, $stopwords));

gives

 Array
(
    [2] => do
    [3] => this
    [4] => I
    [5] => do
    [6] => that
)

But you have to take care of lower and upper case yourself. The easiest way here would be to convert the text to lowercase beforehand.