Question

I need a regular expression to parse words from a sentence or a paragraph. Some separaters that should be used are: spaces, and dots. So in:

My name is Bob.I'm 104 yrs old.

Bob and I'm are seperated even though there isn’t any space between them, but a dot.

Any other regular seperaters of words should also be included.

Answer 1

$words = preg_split('#[\\s.]#', $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);

The \\s will match all white space characters (such as space, tab, new line, etc). The . will match, well a .… If you wanted to add more characters, just add them after the . (with the exceptions that a [, a ] and a # must be escaped with \\, and a - must be the last character in the list)…

It will return for your above sentence:

array(9) {
  [0]=>
  string(2) "My"
  [1]=>
  string(4) "name"
  [2]=>
  string(2) "is"
  [3]=>
  string(3) "Bob"
  [4]=>
  string(3) "I'm"
  [5]=>
  string(3) "104"
  [6]=>
  string(3) "yrs"
  [7]=>
  string(3) "old"
}