Counting items in a array

Hi I'm new here can someone help me i need to know how to count how many times a item appears in a array. this is driving me mad. Here my array

(female/femaleimages/April07003.jpg,female/femaleimages/April07003.jpg,female/femaleimages/April07003.jpg,female/femaleimages/April07004.jpg,female/femaleimages/April07004.jpg)
kind regards
zar

One simple solution would be to first sort the items.
Next thing is:

after this, in arrayItemAppear you have the item name and in arrayItemAppearCount the number of appearances.
to display:
[code]
for (nIndex=0; nIndex<arrayItemAppear.Length; nIndex++)
trace(arrayItemAppear[nIndex] +" appears " + arrayItemAppearCount [nIndex] + " times"
[code]

Another approach would be to get the first item, search for it's occurrence in the rest of the array, store it in an array (arrayItemAppear) and it's number of appearances in another array (arrayItemAppearCount ).
Then go to next item, see if it already exists in the arrayItemAppear. If it does, go to next item. If it doesn't, keep searching for it in the rest of the array. And so on.
This approach will be faster, and to make it even faster, after you find an item, set it to empty -> "".
i.e.:

index = 0;
originalArray: "item1", "item2", "item3", "item1", "item3", "item1", "item2", "item4"

step1:
originalArray[index] = "item1"
is (originalArray[index] == "") ?
if true,
skip to next item;
else
arrayItemAppear[indexAppear] = originalArray[index];
appearCount = 1;
indexAppear++;

search in the rest of the items for the appearance of originalArray[index];
when you find one, set it to "" then appearCount++;
at the end of search, set arrayItemAppearCount = appearCount;

index++;
step2:
originalArray: "", "item2", "item3", "", "item3", "", "item2", "item4"
repeat step1
step3:
originalArray: "", "", "item3", "", "item3", "", "", "item4"
repeat step1

Hope you understood the idea.