Question

preg_match("/\w+/", $s, $matches);

I have the PHP code above. I use it to match words in a string. It works great, except in one case.

Example:

'This is a word' should match {'This','is','a','word'}

'Bös Tüb' should match {'Bös','Tüb'}

The first example works, but the second does not. Instead it returns {'B','s','T','b'}, it does not see the ö and ü as a word character.

Question

How to match the ö and ü and any other characters that are normally used in names (they can be strange, this is about German and Turkish names)? Should I add them all manually (/[a-zA-Z and all others as unicode]/)?

EDIT

As I ofcourse forgot to mention, there are a lot of \n, \r and ' ' characters in between the words. This is why I am using Regex.

Answer 1

You can use the u modifier to deal with Unicode characters. And then decode the matches with utf8_decode().

$s = 'Bös Tüb';
preg_match("/\w+/u", $s, $matches); // use the 'u' modifier
var_dump(utf8_decode($matches[0])); // outputs: Bös