Question

As the title suggests:

I’m trying to split sentences into either a comma-separated string or array consisting of sanitized words greater than 2 characters in length and unique (duplicates removed).

An example string might be:

$sString = 'Stackoverflow's users are awesome!!! Stackoverflow, is the "best" technical questions and answers website on the interwebnet!';

Finished article:

$sStringAfterProcessing = 'stackoverflow, users, are, awesome, the, best, technical, questions, and, answers, website, interwebnet';

Note the first stackflow has the ‘s removed, punctuation and duplicates are removed.

This seems like it could get very complicated.

Suggestions welcome and all help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

Here goes…

str = str.replace(/[^\w\s]/ig, "").replace(/\s/g, ", ");

will yield:

Stackoverflows, users, are, awesome, Stackoverflow, is, the, best, technical, questions, and, answers, website, on, the, interwebnet

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/ktFj2/1/

Or, in array format:

var arr = str.replace(/[^\w\s]/ig, "").split(" ");

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/nnKV8/

Update: To remove duplicates from the array (and items with length < 2), something like this:

var cleaned = [];
for(var i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
    var el = arr[i];

    if (el.length > 2 && $.inArray(el, cleaned) < 0) {
        cleaned.push(el);
    }
}