php regex - splitting strings - one output form

Question

I'm wondering a good way of splitting strings by a | delimiter if the input strings could be of the following form:

"foo,    bar"
"foo       ,bar"
"foo,bar"
"foo , bar"
"foo bar"
"foo,,bar"

So the only possible outputs strings are as:

"foo|bar"
"foo|bar|other|here"

Independently of how many terms are within the input string.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Answer 1

preg_replace('/\s*,\s*/', '|', $string);

This will handle the cases with the comma ;) If you need the one with only the whitespace too:

preg_replace('\s*,\s*|\s+', '|', $string);

Answer 2

Something like this should do the trick...

$outputstring = preg_replace_all('/\b[ ,|]+\b/','|',$inputstring);

to explain:

\b is a word-boundary, so it is looking for any combination of spaces, commas or pipes between two word boundaries.

Answer 3

I would do:

    $input = preg_replace('/[ ,]+/', '|', $input);