Association Problem?

Wanted to see if anyone had any input on this. I have a recordset that is returned to me in my script. What I then would like to do is go through each row of the recordset and use the substr_count function to count the number of times a string appears in each row. Then I'd like to sort & display the recordset based on how many times the string appeared in each row. Basically this is a very light search with a very quick & dirty way to find relevancy. I've thought that I could just store the relevancy numbers in an array, but then how do I know which relevancy number goes with what row in the recordset? That's the association problem I'm talking about. Also, how would I then sort the recordset accordingly based on the relevancy array? I've been looking through the PHP documentation and can't quite get past this question. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks! Gabe