Question

I wish to split a text string into words separated by spaces.
I use

$words=explode(" ", $text);

Unfortunately, this method doesn’t work well for me, because I want to know how many spaces are in between.

Is there any better way to do that than going through the whole $text, symbol by symbol, using while statement to fill out $spaces ( $spaces=array(); ) with integers (number of spaces, in most cases it is 1) and read text into $words=array() symbol by symbol?

Here is an additional explanation.

$text="Hello_world_____123"; //symbol "_" actually means a space

Needed:

$words=("Hello","world","123");
$spaces=(1,5);

Answer 1

There are many ways to do what you’re trying to do, but I would probably choose a combination of preg_split() and array_map():

$text = 'Hello world     123';
$words = preg_split('/\s+/', $text, NULL, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
$spaces = array_map(function ($sp) {
    return strlen($sp);
}, preg_split('/\S+/', $text, NULL, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY));

var_dump($words, $spaces);

Output:

array(3) {
  [0]=>
  string(5) "Hello"
  [1]=>
  string(5) "world"
  [2]=>
  string(3) "123"
}
array(2) {
  [0]=>
  int(1)
  [1]=>
  int(5)
}