Question

I need some help regarding how to split Chinese characters mixed with English words and numbers in PHP.

For example, if I read

FrontPage 2000中文版應用大全

I’m hoping to get

FrontPage, 2000, 中,文,版,應,用,大,全

or

FrontPage, 2,0,0,0, 中,文,版,應,用,大,全

How can I achieve this?

Thanks in advance 🙂

Answer 1

Assuming you are using UTF-8 (or you can convert it to UTF-8 using Iconv or some other tools), then using the u modifier (doc: http://www.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php )

<?
    $s = "FrontPage 2000中文版應用大全";
    print_r(preg_match_all('/./u', $s, $matches));
    echo "\n";
    print_r($matches);
?>

will give

21
Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => F
            [1] => r
            [2] => o
            [3] => n
            [4] => t
            [5] => P
            [6] => a
            [7] => g
            [8] => e
            [9] =>  
            [10] => 2
            [11] => 0
            [12] => 0
            [13] => 0
            [14] => 中
            [15] => 文
            [16] => 版
            [17] => 應
            [18] => 用
            [19] => 大
            [20] => 全
        )

)

Note that my source code is stored in a file encoded in UTF-8 also, for the $s to contain those characters.

The following will match alphanumeric as a group:

<?
$s = "FrontPage 2000中文版應用大全";
print_r(preg_match_all('/(\w+)|(.)/u', $s, $matches));
echo "\n";
print_r($matches[0]);
?>

result:

10
Array
(
    [0] => FrontPage
    [1] =>  
    [2] => 2000
    [3] => 中
    [4] => 文
    [5] => 版
    [6] => 應
    [7] => 用
    [8] => 大
    [9] => 全
)