create an array of words (Strings) from String

Question

How do I create an array of strings from a string, eg.

"hello world" would return ["hello", "world"]. This would need to take into account punctuation marks, etc.

There's probably a great RegEx solution for this, I'm just not capable of finding it.

Answer 1

Any reason that:

var myString:String = "hello world";

var reg:RegExp = /\W/i;

var stringAsArray:Array = myString.replace(reg, "").split(" ");

Won't work?

Answer 2

How about AS3's String.split?

var text:String = "hello world";
var split:Array = text.split(" "); // this will give you ["hello", "world"]
// then iterate and strip out any redundant punctuation like commas, colons and full stops

Answer 3

This seems to do what you want:

package
{
import flash.display.Sprite

public class WordSplit extends Sprite
{
    public function WordSplit()
    {
        var inText:String = "This is a Hello World example.\nIt attempts,\
            to simulate! what splitting\" words ' using: puncuation\tand\
            invisible ; characters ^ & * yeah.";

        var regExp:RegExp = /\w+/g;
        var wordList:Array = inText.match(regExp);

        trace(wordList);
    }
}
}

If not, please provide a sample input and output specification.

Answer 4

Think I've cracked it, here is the function in full:

public static function getArrayFromString(str:String):Array {
        return str.split(/\W | ' | /gi);
    }

Basically, it uses the 'not a word' condition but excludes apostrophes, is global and ignores case. Thanks to everyone who pointed me in the right direction.

Answer 5

I think you might want something like this:

public static function getArrayFromString(str:String):Array {
    return str.split(/[\W']+/gi);
}

Basically, you can add any characters that you want to be considered delimiters into the square brackets. Here's how the pieces work:

1. The brackets define a set of characters.
2. The things in the brackets are the characters in the set (with \W being "not a word")
3. The plus sign means "one or more of the previous item"—in this case, the character set. That way, if you have something with several of the characters in a row, you won't get empty items in your array.