php function that separates a string into different strings?

Question

lets say i have this string here: $string = 'hello my name is "nicholas cage"'.

i want to separate the words into difference strings like this:

$word1 = 'hello';
$word2 = 'my';
$word3 = 'name';
$word4 = 'is';
$word5 = 'nicholas cage';

For fhe first 4 words I can use explode. but how do i do with word5? I want the first and last name to be one string.

Answer 1

with explode:) google is your friend! thought it would be harder to find the function for this!

but how to do with Nicholas Cage?

Answer 2

you could do $bits = explode(' ', $string);, which would give you: hello, my, name, is, nicholas, cage, but there's no way for it to know that "nicholas cage" is one entity.

I'm not sure how to do what you'd want, you may need to cross reference a dictionary database and join any words that aren't found.

Edit: I see you have now quoted "nicholas cage", in that case you can use a regex, something like: preg_match('/([\s"])(.*?)$1/', $str, $matches);

Answer 3

What you're searching for is: explode()

 $text = 'Hello my name is Nicholas Cage';
 $words = explode(" ", $text);

Best wishes, Fabian

Answer 4

that's done by parsing. google "recursive descent".

Answer 5

You can use this regular expression:

/"[^"]*"|\S+/

You can use it like this:

<?php
$target = 'Hello my name is "Nicholas Cage"';
$pattern = '/"[^"]*"|\S+/';
$matches = array();
preg_match_all($pattern,$target,$matches);
var_dump($matches);
?>

Answer 6

This can be done using regexp:

$string = 'hello my name is "nicholas cage"';
preg_match_all('/(?:"[^"]*"|\S+)/', $string, $matches);
print_r($matches[0]);

It works as following:

• Find anythinh which matches:
  • "[^"]*" - anything in double quotes
  • \S+ - more then 1 non-space character

But this result is with quotes. Remove them too:

$words = array_map('remove_starting_ending_quotes', $matches[0]);
print_r($words);

function remove_starting_ending_quotes($str) {
    if (preg_match('/^"(.*)"$/', $str, $matches)) {
     return $matches[1];
    }
    else {
     return $str;
    }
}

Now result looks exactly as expected:

Array
(
    [0] => hello
    [1] => my
    [2] => name
    [3] => is
    [4] => nicholas cage
)

Answer 7

You could also use the string function: str_getcsv if you wanted. Just call the delimiter " " rather than ",";

Example: $array = str_getcsv($string, " ");

Answer 8

this worked for me

$word1 = 'hello'; 
$word2 = 'my'; 
$word3 = 'name'; 
$word4 = 'is'; 
$word5 = 'nicholas cage';

$my = array($word1,$word2,$word3,$word4,$word5);


function word_split($str=array(),$words=1) {
foreach($str as $str)
{
    $arr = preg_split("/[\s]+/", $str,$words+0);
    $arr = array_slice($arr,0,$words);
    }
    return join(' ',$arr);
}

echo word_split($my,1);

returns nicholas cage