[SOLVED] Split a paragraph into sentences?

[Kane250]

I'm hoping someone here has a solution for something like this.  Here is what I want to do.  I want to have a user type a paragraph of some sort into a textarea, then when submitted, I want PHP to separate that paragraph into sentences (probably by capturing all the words between periods, exclamation points, etc.), and then have it insert each sentence separately into a table... possible?  Logically it sounds like it would be, but I don't know where to begin with coding it.  Can anyone assist me in getting this started?

 

Thanks in advance!

[lonewolf217]

you can look into the implode() function which can take a block of text and use a delimiter "." or "!" and split up the text into an array based on that delimiter.

 

there may be another, simpler way to do it as well but i think this would work

[Maq]

you can look into the implode() function which can take a block of text and use a delimiter "." or "!" and split up the text into an array based on that delimiter.

 

there may be another, simpler way to do it as well but i think this would work

 

Correct except for you should be using explode() instead.  It will return an array and you can have multiple delimiters (. ! ? etc...).

[.josh]

You can't have multiple delimiters for explode.  That's what preg_split is for.  But even then, it explodes at the delimiter, so you will get sentences returned without the punctuation marks.  You can take preg_split a step farther and flag it to return them in their own elements with PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE and then run some loop to implode sentence and following punctation mark in the returned array, or just use preg_match_all:

 

preg_match_all('~.*?[?.!]~s',$string,$sentences);

 

[Maq]

You can't have multiple delimiters for explode.  That's what preg_split is for.

 

Yep sorry about that    Regex definitely is better here for reasons CV mentioned

[Kane250]

this sounds like exactly what I need.  Thanks!