PHP: Count specific Character in String

In this tip, I would like to show how to count a particular character in a string. 

In the example, we want to determine the number of incidents of the character "|" in a given string.

// our string
$s = '1|2|3|4';

// count characters
$c = substr_count($s, '|');

// output result (3)
echo $c; 

We make use of the function substr_count(). This function expects the string as a first parameter and the character to be counted as a second parameter.

Additionally, it is also possible to pass a string consisting of multiple characters as a second parameter to be able to count how often this string is present. Further on, you can also pass an optional third and fourth parameter. The third parameter sets the position from which should be counted and the fourth parameter the length in characters that should be counted at a maximum.