Exploding strings

[gerkintrigg]

I'm writing a chat robot and need to explode a string, using either a space, full-stop (period), comma, question-mark etc.

 

I'm using: $words=explode(" ", $search_phrase); and just need other variables to split it by.

 

Thanks.

[Wildbug]

preg_split('/\s+|[,?!]/',$string);

 

There might be another, non-preg function, but I don't know it offhand.

[obsidian]

preg_split('/\s+|[,?!]/',$string);

 

There might be another, non-preg function, but I don't know it offhand.

 

I'll second that suggestion. The only thing you'll have to watch out for is the fact that this will split all words on to separate lines. So, even if you have something like an email address that contains one of your punctuations for which you are searching, you'll split on it:

 

<?php
$string = "[email protected] is my email!";
$words = preg_split('|[\s,?!.]|', $string);
// results in array('i', 'the', 'bomb@mydomain', 'co', 'uk')
?>

 

You may be better off just doing a preg_match_all() on all word boundaries:

<?php
preg_match_all('|\b(.+?)\b|', $string, $words, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
?>

 

Hope this helps.

[gerkintrigg]

brilliant, thanks!

[The Little Guy]

<?php
$sometext = "This is a senten-ce. Do you like it?";
$arrays = preg_split("/ |-/",$sometext);