Question

I am using the Google directions API in my web application, is there any way to shorten the direction description provided by Google?

I mean, for example,

Take the 2nd right.
Take the 2nd left toward ...

Can I shorten it? It’s too long.

Can I make it just like this:

2nd right>2nd left>

Is there any way to modify the result? I am using PHP for developing the web application and the JSON format for displaying the API result.
edit:
The API result displays correctly. But I want to remove certain common words such as ‘Take’, ‘The’, ‘at’ etc
API result displaying part of my code:if ($data->status === 'OK') {
$route = $data->routes[0];
foreach ($route->legs as $leg) {
foreach ($leg->steps as $step) {
echo $step->html_instructions . "<br>\n";

Answer 1

This worked for me, hopefully it will work for you too…

<?php
$test1 = 'Take the 2nd right.';
$test2 = 'Take the 2nd left toward the exit, then...';
$reg_find = '/Take the (.*?) (right|left).*/';
$reg_replace = '$1 $2';
$results = array(
    preg_replace($reg_find, $reg_replace, $test1),
    preg_replace($reg_find, $reg_replace, $test2)
);
echo implode('>', $results);
?>

EDIT:

For a more flexible solution, I have created this:

<?php
$test1 = 'Take the 2nd right.';
$test2 = 'Take the 2nd left toward the exit, then ...';
$remove = '/( ?)(take|then|at|toward|the|exit|\.|,)( ?)/i';
$results = array(
    preg_replace($remove, '', $test1),
    preg_replace($remove, '', $test2)
);
echo implode('>', $results);
?>