PHP script to count word instances in a string

Method 1: built-in functions

<?php
$text = "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog the end";

// lower-case, then extract words (letters, digits, apostrophes)
$words = str_word_count(strtolower($text), 1);

// count occurrences of each word
$counts = array_count_values($words);

// sort by frequency (highest first)
arsort($counts);

echo "<table border='1'><tr><th>Word</th><th>Count</th></tr>";
foreach ($counts as$word => $count) {
    echo "<tr><td>$word</td><td>$count</td></tr>";
}
echo "</table>";
?>

Output (top rows): the → 3, quick → 1, brown → 1, fox → 1, ...

Method 2: manual loop

<?php
$text  = "to be or not to be";
$words = explode(" ", strtolower($text));
$count = [];

foreach ($words as$w) {
    $w = trim($w, ".,!?;:");
    if ($w === "") continue;
    if (isset($count[$w])) {
        $count[$w]++;
    } else {
        $count[$w] = 1;
    }
}

foreach ($count as$w => $c) {
    echo "$w :$c<br>";
}
?>

Output: to : 2, be : 2, or : 1, not : 1

Explanation

1. strtolower() makes counting case-insensitive.
2. str_word_count($s, 1) (or explode) splits the text into an array of words.
3. array_count_values() builds an associative array of word → frequency; the manual loop does the same with an isset check.
4. arsort() orders the result by frequency.