php An or A function.

[Vivid Lust]

Does anyone know of a function that can look at a word an determine if an or a should go before it.

 

Example:

 

INPUT: english

OUTPUT: an

 

INPUT: spanish

OUTPUT: a

 

Thanks all for any help,

 

Jake

[trq]

You'll need to be more descriptive. Your example makes little sense to me.

[salathe]

thorpe, the OP wants to be able to determine whether "an" or "a" should preceed a word. For example given the words apple, banana, orange the correct choices would be an, a, an respectively.

[Catfish]

a regular expression preg_match() looking for the string starting with a vowel as a condition inside an if() statement would provide flow for "an" and an else {} for any other result ("a") would probably do it. don't have time to work out the regexp to use but.

[trq]

I'm not sure how that would be achieved through php. The rule is  that you use a before words that start with a consonant sound and an before words that start with a vowel sound.

[Catfish]

yeah i was wondering about how many times it would actually fail if you just based it on the starting letter, but couldn't think of many words where it doesn't, though knowing english, there is probably many of them.

[Vivid Lust]

I'm looking for one that just checks the starting letter, thanks.

[rajivgonsalves]

if your looking for one that checks the starting letter I think the following should do

<?php
function getBefore($word) {
	return in_array(strtolower(substr($word,0,1)), array('a','e','i','o','u')) ? 'an' : 'a';
}

echo getBefore('english') . '<br />';

echo getBefore('spanish') . '<br />';
?>

[salathe]

You could also replace the return statement in rajivgonsalves' function with the similarly functioning:

 

return strspn(strtolower($word[0]), 'aeiou') ? 'an' : 'a';

[MoonParsnip]

A bit of a late reply... however hopefully this is useful for anyone stumbling across this forum post: http://www.technologywales.co.uk/coding-solution-using-an-or-a-before-a-word/