Count number of values in array with a given value

Question

Say I have an array like this:

$array = array('', '', 'other', '', 'other'); 

How can I count the number with a given value (in the example blank)?

And do it efficiently? (for about a dozen arrays with hundreds of elements each) This example times out (over 30 sec):

function without($array) {     $counter = 0;     for($i = 0, $e = count($array); $i < $e; $i++) {         if(empty($array[$i])) {             $counter += 1;         }     }     return $counter; } 

In this case the number of blank elements is 3.

Answer 1

How about using array_count _values to get an array with everything counted for you?