PHP - Seperate words into different categories? - php

Question

Lets say I have a text document that cannot be changed in any way and needs to be left as is.
Example of what the text document is likely formatted to be:
1. What is soup commonly paired with?
2.
3.
4. Alcohol
5. Water
6. Bread
7. Vegtables
8.
9.
10.
Note:
The numbers are not included, but they are used to represent the small spaces in between the words that are always there.
There is not always a question mark with the question
Note 2:
The question may be on 2 lines sometimes and may look like this below
0. What is soup
1. commonly paired with?
2.
3.
4. Alcohol
5. Water
6. Bread
7. Vegtables
8.
9.
10.
Other:
So how exactly do I seperate them, for example into an array?
So like $questions[] and $answers[]
The main problem is that I have nothing to link the questions and answers to:
I can't guess the exact line they are on
And the question doesn't always have a question mark
So there is nothing I can really link it to?

Answer 1

Assuming you have already read the text from the document into a variable $text, you can separate the question and answers by splitting on the first blank line in the text.
$qAndAs = preg_split('/\n\s*\n/', $text, 2, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
The split pattern is a line break (\n), zero or more whitespaces (\s*), and another line break.
That should give you an two-element array, where [0] is the question and [1] is the answers.
If it doesn't, then something went wrong.
if (count($qAndAs) !== 2) {
// The text from the document didn't fit the expected pattern.
// Decide how to handle that. Maybe throw an exception.
}
After you have separated them, you can remove any new lines from the question
$question = str_replace(["\r", "\n"], ' ', trim($qAndAs[0]));
and split your answers into another array.
$answers = preg_split('/\s*\n\s*/', $qAndAs[1], -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);

Answer 2

Both solutions accept multiple questions / answers in a single file.
Solution 1 (similar to the other one in this thread):
$questions = array();
$answers = array();
//Split text into questions and answers blocks (2 line breaks or more from each other)
$text = preg_split('/\n{2,}/', $text, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
foreach ($text as $key => $value)
{
//0, 2, 4, ... are questions, 1, 3, 5, ... are answers
if ($key % 2)
{
$answers[] = explode("\n", $value);
}
else
{
$questions[] = str_replace("\n", '', $value);
}
}
Solution 2 (ugly line by line reading from a file):
//Open the file
$f = fopen("test.txt","r");
//Initialize arrays of all questions and all answers
$all_questions = array();
$all_answers = array();
$is_question = true;
$last = ''; //contains a previous line
//Iterate over lines
while (true)
{
//Get line
$line = fgets($f);
//Check if end of file
$end = ($line === false);
//Trim current line
$line = trim($line);
if ($line != '')
{
//If the previous line was empty, then reset current question and answers
if ($last == '')
{
$question = array();
$answers = array();
}
//Add line of question or answer
if ($is_question)
{
$question[] = $line;
}
else
{
$answers[] = $line;
}
}
else
{
//If the previous line wasn't empty, or we reached the end of file, then save question / answers, and toggle $is_question
if ($last != '' OR $end)
{
if ($is_question)
{
$all_questions[] = implode(' ', $question); //implode to merge multiline question
$is_question = false;
}
else
{
$all_answers[] = $answers;
$is_question = true;
}
}
}
//Break if end of file
if ($end)
{
break;
}
$last = $line;
}
fclose($f);