Entry

How do I get the first n words of a string?

How do I get the last n words of a string?

May 29th, 2002 09:43
Philip Olson, Jacob Stetser,

One way is to create an array from all the words of the string by 
splitting the string.  For example, let's split on spaces:

  $str = "hello, today sure is a nice day";
  $words = split('[ ]+', $str);

  print $words[0]; // hello
  print $words[2]; // sure

To use only a portion of this array of words, consider the 
array_slice() function:

  $somewords = array_slice($words, 0, 20);

Now we have an array of the first 20 words.  Let's put it all together 
now:

function get_some_words($str, $count = 20)
{
  $words = split('[ ]+', $str);

  if (sizeof($words) > $count) {
      $words = array_slice($words, 0, $count);
  }

  return implode($words, ' ');
}

Note that what you split on is important.  In our example above we 
treat multiple spaces '   ' the same as single spaces ' '.  Let's say 
you want to eliminate all non alpha-numerical characters during the 
split, then use this regex instead:

    $words = split('[^[:alnum:]]+', $str);

In our example function, all multiple spacings will result in single 
spacing after going through get_some_words().  So '  ' => ' '.

See also: http://www.php.net/split
          http://www.php.net/preg_split