count the occurrences of all the letters in a string PHP

Question

I want to count the frequency of occurrences of all the letters in a string. Say I have

$str = "cdcdcdcdeeeef";

I can use str_split and array_count_values to achieve this.

array_count_values(str_split($str));

Wondering if there is another way to do this without converting the string to an array? Thanks

Answer 1

You don't have to convert that into an array() you can use substr_count() to achieve the same.

substr_count — Count the number of substring occurrences

<?php
$str = "cdcdcdcdeeeef";
echo substr_count($str, 'c'); 
?>

PHP Manual

substr_count() returns the number of times the needle substring occurs in the haystack string. Please note that needle is case sensitive.

EDIT:

Sorry for the misconception, you can use count_chars to have a counted value of each character in a string. An example:

<?php
$str = "cdcdcdcdeeeef";

foreach (count_chars($str, 1) as $strr => $value) {
   echo chr($strr) . " occurred a number of $value times in the string." . "<br>";
}
?>

PHP Manual: count_chars

count_chars — Return information about characters used in a string