Under Return Values for Count()
Returns the number of elements in var. If var is not an array or an object with implemented Countable interface, 1 will be returned. There is one exception, if var is NULL, 0 will be returned.
I have a string which is filled with letters and numbers and I'm using preg_match_all() to extract those numbers. As I recall preg_match_all fills the contents of the array given in the 3rd parameter with the results. Why does it return 1?
What am I doing wrong in my code?
$string = "9hsfgh563452";
preg_match_all("/[0-9]/",$string,$matches);
echo "Array size: " . count($matches)."</br>"; //Returns 1
echo "Array size: " . sizeof($matches)."</br>"; //Returns 1
print_r($matches);
I would like to sum the contents of the array (which is all the numbers returned in the string) array_sum() didn't work ; it is a string array and I don't know how to convert it to an int array because I'm not using any delimiters like ' , ' and such. Is there a more efficient way in doing this?
The count is 1 because $matches is an array which contains another array inside. Specifically, $matches[0] is an array that contains each match of the zero-th capturing group (the whole regular expression).
That is, $matches looks like this:
Array
(
[0] => Array // The key "0" means that matches for the whole regex follow
(
[0] => 9 // and here are all the single-character matches
[1] => 5
[2] => 6
[3] => 3
[4] => 4
[5] => 5
[6] => 2
)
)