Question

I am trying to split raw text into sentences. So I simply use preg_split() function and split a raw text into sentence based on occurrence of ?, . and ;. But as expected I faced some problem due to some special case of . for example “Dr.”, “Mr.”, etc.

How can I exclude such word, or patter from spliting?

preg_split('/(\. )|(\? )|(\; )!(Mr\.)/', $content);

Answer 1

You can add negative lookbehind to the regex to make sure that the dot is not preceded by “Mr” and company:

preg_split('/((?<!(Mr|Dr))\.|\?|;) /', $content);

I also simplified the regex a little bit. You should also consider substituting \s|$ (any whitespace or end of input) for the single space at the end of the current expression.

See it in action.