How to? Count of Birthdays on Forum Home

[kyrnel]

Im trying to find the way to do this with the least overhead.
I know I can add some code to index.php to run a query to count the number of birthdays from today, but I'd have to add a number of functions that are redundant of ones in /includes/functions_databuild.php.

Right now the only thing sent to ForumHome is a string value containing all of the current birthdays.
I figure that the only way to get the number of birthdays from the string is to count the commas. Unfortunately I am a bit too new in PHP to fugure this one out.

Is there is a PHP function that counts the number of occurances of one string inside another string?

If not, I will probably have to create a loop that cycles through the string counting the commas (Chr(44)) then add 1 to get the number of birthdays (unless the string is zero-length in which case there are no birthdays).

Any ideas?