Question

I need to split the following string and put each new line into a new array element.

this is line a.(EOL chars = '\r\n' or '\n')
(EOL chars)
this is line b.(EOL chars)
this is line c.(EOL chars)
this is the last line d.(OPTIONAL EOL chars)

(Note that the last line might not have any EOL characters present. The string also sometimes contains only 1 line, which is by definition the last one.)

The following rules must be followed:

• Empty lines (like the second line) should be discarded and not put
  into the array.
• EOL chars should not be included, because otherwise
  my string comparisons fail.

So this should result in the following array:

[0] => "this is line a."
[1] => "this is line b."
[2] => "this is line c."
[3] => "this is the last line d."

I tried doing the following:

$matches = array();
preg_match_all('/^(.*)$/m', $str, $matches);
return $matches[1];

$matches[1] indeed contains each new line, but:

• Empty lines are included as well
• It seems that a ‘\r’ character gets smuggled in anyway at the end of the strings in the array. I suspect this has something to do with the regex range ‘.’ which includes everything except ‘\n’.

Anyway, I’ve been playing around with ‘\R’ and whatnot, but I just can’t find a good regex pattern that follows the two rules I outlined above. Any help please?

Answer 1

Just use preg_split() to split on the regular expression:

// Split on \n, \r is optional..
// The last element won't need an EOL.
$array = preg_split("/\r?\n/", $string);

Note, you might also want to trim($string) if there is a trailing newline, so you don’t end up with an extra empty array element.