Are there any best practices for efficiently counting the occurrences of a specific character in a string using PHP?

To efficiently count the occurrences of a specific character in a string using PHP, you can use the `substr_count()` function. This function takes the string to search in and the character to count as parameters, and returns the number of times the character appears in the string.

$string = "Hello, World!";
$char = "l";
$count = substr_count($string, $char);
echo "The character '$char' appears $count times in the string.";