How to break string through regex in PHP - php

Question

String:
"hello, how are you? you are fine. i am good too."
I want to break this string on the basis of , ? . these characters in php through reg-ex or you can provide me simple reg-ex.
Desired result in an array:
[0]hello
[1]how are you
[2]you are fine
[3]i am good too
Please provide regex for this. again the question is that provide the regex through which i can break the string. Matching characters should be . , ?

Answer 1

You can use preg_split with this regex:
/[^A-Za-z\s]\s*/
It looks for a character which is not a letter or whitespace, followed optionally by one or more spaces. This allows for the situation where there is no space after the punctuation mark. Note we use the PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY flag to preg_split so that if the string ends in a punctuation mark we don't get empty strings in the output.
$string = "hello, how are you?you are fine. i am good too.";
$output = preg_split('/[^A-Za-z\s]\s*/', $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
print_r($output);
Output:
Array (
[0] => hello
[1] => how are you
[2] => you are fine
[3] => i am good too
)
Demo on 3v4l.org

Answer 2

You can just use the preg_split method with a regex that matches any non-word character followed by a space and a non-word character at the end of the text.
The if is used to pop the ending empty string present in the array if your input text does contain a punctuation character at the very end of it.
$input = "hello, how are you? you are fine. i am good too.";
$output = preg_split( "/\W(?:\s|$)/", $input );
if(strlen(end($output))==0)
{
array_pop($output);
}
foreach ($output as $item) {
echo $item;
echo "\n";
}
output:
hello
how are you
you are fine
i am good too