PHP count the number of occurances of values of a variable

Question

This has to do with counting in PHP, and there are numerous questions and examples of that, but none that I can find of what I need to do: count the occurrences of the value of a variable and output that count as its own variable.

The values I want to count and output as variables are each of the 50 state two letter abbreviations, i.e. AL, AK AR...; they are contained in $state.

What's the most efficient way to count the number of occurrences of each state and output each as a variable, i.e. $AL_total and $AK_total and $AR_total, etc.?

// I have data in the format
// firstname\n lastname \naddress \ncity \nstate \nzip
// This explode strings into array
foreach($values as $val) {
$valuearray = explode("\n", implode($val));

// This assigns variables that are used to echo each field of data
$firstname = $valuearray[0];
$lastname = $valuearray[1];
$address = $valuearray[2];
$city = $valuearray[3];
$state = $valuearray[4];
$zip = $valuearray[5];

// count $state and output as $AL_total , $AK_total , $AR_total , etc.


// And then...

echo $AL_total;

etc....

Answer 1

This could be an aproach based in your initial requirements:

#inside the loop

$states[$state] = null;

if (!isset(${$state . '_total'})) {
    ${$state . '_total'} = 1;
} else {
    ${$state . '_total'} += 1;
}

And then:

#after the loop
foreach ($states as $state => $_null) {
    echo "Total ".$state." = ".${$state . '_total'}."\n";
}

And if you want to ouput a specific state that you know it:

#after the loop
echo "Total AL = ".((isset($AL_total)) ? $AL_total : 0);

You can see it runing here

---

And if you prefer to get a single array using array_count_values() function (as commented by @nice_dev) the do the following:

#inside the loop
$states_count[] = $state;

And then:

#after the loop
$count_by_state = array_count_values($states_count);
print_r($count_by_state);
echo "Total AL = ".(isset($count_by_state['AL']) ? $count_by_state['AL'] : 0);

will output something like this:

Array
(
    [AN] => 1
    [AK] => 5
    [AR] => 5
    [AL] => 4
)
Total AL = 4

You can see it running here