Count no.of characters in a string without spaces and special characters?

Question

We have strlen and mb_strlen of the count the string but that give the all the characters in the string . I want to count only character [a-z][A-Z] in the given string is there any per defined function .Or we need to develop our own logic.

Answer 1

Tested

The following regex replaces all numbers, symbols & spaces. Shortly saying.. it will allow only alphabets A-Z and a-z, others won't be taken into account.

<?php
$str='Hello World345345 *90234 $$5assd54';
$str = preg_replace("/[^A-Za-z]/","",$str);
echo $str;//HelloWorldassd
echo strlen($str);//14

Answer 2

I think you'll need to use your own logic. If you're only interested in counting a-z and A-Z then this should work:

<?php
$string= 'This is my sample string.';

echo "Everything: ".strlen($string);
echo '<br />';
echo "Only alphabetical: ".strlen(preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z]/', '', $string));
?>

Basically that's just removing everything that isn't in our allowed characters list then counting the characters in the result.