Question

I’m looking for something along the line of

str_split_whole_word($longString, $x)

Where $longString is a collection of sentences, and $x is the character length for each line. It can be fairly long, and I want to basically split it into multiple lines in the form of an array.

For example:

$longString = 'I like apple. You like oranges. We like fruit. I like meat, also.';
$lines = str_split_whole_word($longString, $x);

Desired output:

$lines = Array(
    [0] = 'I like apple. You'
    [1] = 'like oranges. We'
    [2] = and so on...
)

Answer 1

This code avoid breaking words, you won’t get it using wordwrap().

The maximum length is defined using $maxLineLength. I’ve done some tests and it works fine.

$longString = 'I like apple. You like oranges. We like fruit. I like meat, also.';

$words = explode(' ', $longString);

$maxLineLength = 18;

$currentLength = 0;
$index = 0;

foreach ($words as $word) {
    // +1 because the word will receive back the space in the end that it loses in explode()
    $wordLength = strlen($word) + 1;

    if (($currentLength + $wordLength) <= $maxLineLength) {
        $output[$index] .= $word . ' ';
        $currentLength += $wordLength;
    } else {
        $index += 1;
        $currentLength = $wordLength;
        $output[$index] = $word;
    }
}