What potential pitfalls should be avoided when trying to count the occurrences of a word in a string using PHP?

One potential pitfall to avoid when counting occurrences of a word in a string using PHP is to ensure that the search is case-insensitive if needed. This is important because PHP's string functions are case-sensitive by default, so failing to account for this could lead to inaccurate counts. To solve this issue, you can use the `stripos()` function instead of `strpos()` to perform a case-insensitive search. 

$string = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
$word = "the";

$count = 0;
$offset = 0;

while (($pos = stripos($string, $word, $offset)) !== false) {
    $count++;
    $offset = $pos + strlen($word);
}

echo "The word '$word' occurs $count times in the string.";

Keywords

strpos substr_count regex case sensitivity edge cases

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