Recently asked on Yahoo! Answers:

Using PHP to show how many letters in a word?

Is there a way to find out how many of a certain letter are in variables with php?
e.g. $5 = ‘dinosaurs’;

So it somehow echos how many of each letter there is?
e.g.
1-d
1-i
1-n
1-o
2-s
1-a
1-u
1-r

There is a built-in PHP function called count_chars(). However, it will count everything — spaces, numbers, punctuation, etc. It also builds in the ability to select all characters, only those characters that exist in the string more than once and only those characters that don’t appear in a string. It doesn’t really work the way the questioner asked, so we’ll proceed with our own function.

This is easily done by making a function that will store, in an associative array, all the letters present in the string, plus the count for each.

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Recently asked on Yahoo! Answers:

Question on Java script?

I have one html page which contain one select and two multi select box.when I select something from select menu(Ex:a,b,c) the corresponding items(a1,a2,a3….or b1,b2,b3….) arecoming in multiselect box.from the first multiselect box1 i am able to transfer the selected datas to multiselect box2.My problem is to retain the datas that are in the multiselect boxes for a particular selction in select box.These values should retain when every time I circulate through the select items.How will I do that.

I assume from this question what the user wants is this:

• A single-choice select box (combo box) is displayed; it has several options.
• Two additional multiple select boxes (list boxes) are displayed; they have some combination of options which match the choices in the combo box. (For the purposes of this example, I’ll add a value in one of these list boxes that doesn’t appear in the combo box. Also, the items in the two list boxes won’t be the same; one will match all available options in the combo box; the second, only a few.)
• As the user makes choices with the combo box, the corresponding options in the list boxes are highlighted; every time a new selection is made in a combo box, that selection is also selected in the matching list box options. Previously selected items are never removed. (For the purpose of this demo, I will add a button that clears all previous selections in a fell swoop.)

The technique here is very straightforward; we simply use a global array to store all the choices made so far from the combo box, then use that array to choose what is selected in the list boxes.

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