Question

How can I explode the following string:

Lorem ipsum "dolor sit amet" consectetur "adipiscing elit" dolor

into

array("Lorem", "ipsum", "dolor sit amet", "consectetur", "adipiscing elit", "dolor")

So that the text in quotation is treated as a single word.

Here’s what I have for now:

$mytext = "Lorem ipsum %22dolor sit amet%22 consectetur %22adipiscing elit%22 dolor"
$noquotes = str_replace("%22", "", $mytext");
$newarray = explode(" ", $noquotes);

but my code divides each word into an array. How do I make words inside quotation marks treated as one word?

Answer 1

You could use a preg_match_all(...):

$text = 'Lorem ipsum "dolor sit amet" consectetur "adipiscing \\"elit" dolor';
preg_match_all('/"(?:\\\\.|[^\\\\"])*"|\S+/', $text, $matches);
print_r($matches);

which will produce:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => Lorem
            [1] => ipsum
            [2] => "dolor sit amet"
            [3] => consectetur
            [4] => "adipiscing \"elit"
            [5] => dolor
        )

)

And as you can see, it also accounts for escaped quotes inside quoted strings.

EDIT

A short explanation:

"           # match the character '"'
(?:         # start non-capture group 1 
  \\        #   match the character '\'
  .         #   match any character except line breaks
  |         #   OR
  [^\\"]    #   match any character except '\' and '"'
)*          # end non-capture group 1 and repeat it zero or more times
"           # match the character '"'
|           # OR
\S+         # match a non-whitespace character: [^\s] and repeat it one or more times

And in case of matching %22 instead of double quotes, you’d do:

preg_match_all('/%22(?:\\\\.|(?!%22).)*%22|\S+/', $text, $matches);