PHP max() with an array of strings?

Question

Hi all

I have an array of tags taken from a MySQL database. Obviously, these tags are strings and are stored in an array, with one element in the array storing each tag. TO build my tag cloud, I want to be able to count the occurrences of each tag to find the most common tag.

For example, if I have the table below...

tag1
tag1
hi
bye
gnu
tux
tag1
tux
tux
tag1
...
etc

... the most commonly occurring tag is "tag1" what I want to do is count how many times that tag occurs in the array. Max() doesn't help here due to it only liking numerical values.

Can anyone help?

Thanks,

James

Answer 1

use array_count_values

<?php
$array = array(1, "hello", 1, "world", "hello");
print_r(array_count_values($array));
?>


Array
(
    [1] => 2
    [hello] => 2
    [world] => 1
)

http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-count-values.php

if you want not case sensetive version use :

$ar = array_count_values(array_map('strtolower', $ar));

Answer 2

I suspect you could have your database perform all the heavy lifting for you. Sounds like you are getting an array of tags, maybe like this

SELECT tag FROM mytable;

But you could do this

SELECT tag,count(*) AS occurrences FROM mytable 
GROUP BY tag
ORDER BY occurences;

Hey presto, a list of tags and their frequency!

Answer 3

if you array is like this

$array = array('tag1','tag1','hi','bye','gnu','tux','tag1','tux','tux','tag1');

$arrayCounting = array_count_values($array));

will give you an array like this to work with

Array
(
    [tag1] => 4
    [hi] => 1
    [bye] => 1
    [gnu] => 1
    [tux] => 3
)