Question

I’m trying to write a regular expression that will match the first 8 words of a string (including any punctuation at the end), but I’m running into problems when a word contains an apostrophe or single quote character. My current regex is as follow:

/(\b[\w,']+[.?'!\"]*\s){8}/

and my example string is:

Went for Valentine's day, food was about a B, filet mignon was served chopped up

Currently, The match i’m getting returned is this:

s day, food was about a B, filet

But I want it to be like this:

Went for Valentine's day, food was about a

I tried introudcing a ' into my character set [\w,'] but it’s not working correctly. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Although this can be done with a regex, this can be done with preg_split at least as easily:

$string="Went for Valentine's day, food was about a B, filet mignon was served chopped up";

$words=preg_split("/\s+/",$string);

#If there are more than eight words, only take the first eight elements of $words.
if(count($words)>8)
{
  $words=array_slice($words,0,8);
}

echo implode(" ",$words) . "\n";

This produces the following output:

Went for Valentine's day, food was about a