Question

How to split a multibyte string into words in Php?
Here is what I have done so far, but I would like to improve the code…

   mb_internal_encoding( 'UTF-8');
   mb_regex_encoding( 'UTF-8');
   $arr = mb_split( '[\s\[\]().,;:-_]', $str );

Is there a way to say that a word is a sequence of “alpha”-characters (not using the notation a-z, since I would like to include non-latin characters)

Answer 1

Try this baby here:

preg_match_all('/[\p{L}\p{M}]+/u', $subject, $result, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
for ($i = 0; $i < count($result[0]); $i++) {
    # Matched text = $result[0][$i];
}

Matches all possible letter with their accents as words:

     "
[\p{L}\p{M}]       # Match a single character present in the list below
                   # A character with the Unicode property “letter” (any kind of letter from any language)
                   # A character with the Unicode property “mark” (a character intended to be combined with another character (e.g. accents, umlauts, enclosing boxes, etc.))
   +               # Between one and unlimited times, as many times as possible, giving back as needed (greedy)
"

See it.