Robson » Little Red Book » Text processing #1

Chapter 6 - Question 11

Process input text from the keyboard to count the number of characters and lines entered.

Solution 1

<?
// some text to process later
// this is the start of the Apache readme file
$text = "The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant
web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP
Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the
Internet. As a project of the Apache Software Foundation, the
developers aim to collaboratively develop and maintain a robust,
commercial-grade, standards-based server with freely available
source code.";

// count the number of lines
$lines = substr_count($text, chr(13))+1;

// remove the new lines
$text = str_replace(array(chr(13), chr(10)), '', $text);

// store the number of characters (including spaces)
$chars_with_spaces = strlen($text);
// store the number of characters (without spaces)
$chars_without_spaces = strlen(str_replace(' ', '', $text));

// show the number of lines and characters
echo 'Lines: ' . $lines . '<br/>' .
'Characters (including spaces): ' . $chars_with_spaces . '<br/>' .
'Characters (excluding spaces): ' . $chars_without_spaces;
?>

Which produces:

Lines: 1
Characters (including spaces): 396
Characters (excluding spaces): 339

Microsoft Word says there are 7 lines, 339 characters (excluding spaces) and 402 characters (including spaces). Microsoft Word seems to be including new lines as characters, so it's character count including spaces is higher.

Log

May 2, 2005 - Added solution 1.