Question

i try to strip a typical Google Search String into it’s part.
i.e. the sting could be :”how to” engine -fuel

So i want to get “how to” and engine and -fuel seperately.

I tried with the following preg_match_all, but i get “how and to” seperately as well and that might get unneccesarily difficult to process.

preg_match_all(
     '=(["]{1}[^"]{1,}["]{1})'
    .'|([-]{1}[^ ]{1,}[ ]{1})'
    .'|([^-"]{1}[^ ]{1,}[ ]{1})=si', 
  $filter, 
  $matches,
  PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);

Anyone any idea how to do this right?

Answer 1

Try:

$q = '"how to" engine -fuel';
preg_match_all('/"[^"]*"|\S+/', $q, $matches);
print_r($matches);

which will print:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => "how to"
            [1] => engine
            [2] => -fuel
        )

)

Meaning:

"[^"]*"    # match a quoted string
|          # OR
\S+        # 1 or more non-space chars