Question

What’s the optimal way to extract each words from a string such as:

one, two, "big three", four, "seven and eight"

where those surrounded with double quotes should be treated as a single element:

array("one", "two", "big three", "four", "seven and eight")

Answer 1

If you are using php >= 5.3 then you have the function str_getcsv.

$tags = str_getcsv($tags, ',', '"', '\\');
$tags = array_map('trim', $tags);