Question

How can I break a string up by spaces in PHP, respecting quoted sub strings? I think there must be some command to parse this type of string like arguments but I don’t know what that is.

Example string:

$string = '12345 abcd "hello world" defgh "nice to meet you" 34554';

I normally use one of these three to break up strings. But I don’t think they have the capability to break the string up like I’m suggesting.

$result = str_replace(' ',"\n",$string);
$result = explode(' ',$string);
$result = preg_replace('#\s#',"\n",$string);

Outcome:

12345
abcd
"hello
world"
defgh
"nice
to
meet
you"
34554

Desired outcome:

12345
abcd
hello world
defgh
nice to meet you
34554

UPDATE

I guess I was impressed with PHP’s parse_str command to deal with URL query variables and was hoping PHP had something I that could work for this example, sort of like getopt does for the command line arguments.

Answer 1

You can use fgetcsv() / str_getcsv() for this.

<?php
$string = '12345 abcd "hello world" defgh "nice to meet you" 34554';
$row = str_getcsv($string, ' ');
var_dump($row);

prints

array(6) {
  [0]=>
  string(5) "12345"
  [1]=>
  string(4) "abcd"
  [2]=>
  string(11) "hello world"
  [3]=>
  string(5) "defgh"
  [4]=>
  string(16) "nice to meet you"
  [5]=>
  string(5) "34554"
}