CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregex
JDelage
JDelage

Reputation: 13682

Explode or split a utf-8 string but keep delimiters attached to string

I would like to transform a string into an array of elements delimited by commas or period, but where each element keeps its delimiter. For example, the first sentence to the preamble of the US Declaration of Independence would become:

What would be an efficient way to do that? I know how to save into an array both the pieces and the delimiters, using preg_split with the PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE flag, but I'm not sure if there is a way to keep the commas and periods appended to the sentence fragments in one operation.

I guess a more accurate way to describe what I want is a preg_split where the delimiter would be anything preceded by a comma, a period, etc. I'm not sure whether regex would allow that...

And I need this to be utf8-friendly.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1981

Answers (2)

Rusty Fausak
Rusty Fausak

Reputation: 7525

If I understand you correctly, you are looking for something like the following:

$str = 'asdf, qwer, zxcv, uiop';
$arr = preg_split('/(,)/', $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
$tmp = array();
for ($i = 0; $i < sizeof($arr); $i += 2) {
    $delim = isset($arr[$i + 1]) ? $arr[$i + 1] : '';
    $tmp[] = $arr[$i] . $delim;
}
print_r($tmp);

Which prints:

Array
(
    [0] => asdf,
    [1] =>  qwer,
    [2] =>  zxcv,
    [3] =>  uiop
)

Upvotes: 0

JRL
JRL

Reputation: 78013

Would this work?

if (preg_match_all("/([^.,!?]*[.,!?])/", $str, $matches)) {
    var_dump($matches[1]);
}

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions