Question

Ive got a string that are words bunched together and I need to seperate them, and every word that ends in ‘A’ should probably be on a new line,

item onea second itema third

I also need to check if the word ending in ‘A’ should actually end in ‘A’ like extra or sultana.

item oneasecond itemand an extra item

I have an array full of words ending in ‘A’ from this website http://www.morewords.com/ends-with/a so I just need the preg_replace function.

I really am learning everytime someone answers a question here so again thanks for everyones time and patience

Answer 1

You could do something like this:

// assoc array keyed on words that end with A
$endsWithA = array("sultana" => 1, ...); 

$words = split(' ', $string);

$newString = '';
$finalStrings = array();

foreach ($words AS $w) {    
    // if it ends with a, check to see if it's a real word.
    // if so, end the current string and store it
    if (preg_match("/a$/", $w) && !$endsWithA[$w]) {
        $w = preg_replace("/a$/","", $w);
        $newString .= $w;
        $finalStrings[] = $newString;
        $newString = '';
    }
    else {
        $newString .= $w . ' ';
    }    
}

// Get any remaining newString
if ($newString) $finalStrings[] = trim($newString);

print_r($finalStrings);

Haven’t tested it, etc., but it would give you an array $finalStrings populated with the strings split from the original.

Update: fixed a couple of typos in the code.