Separate Unicode and Ascii Charactors with White Space from PHP - php

Question

I'm Doing some class to Handle Sinhala Unicode from php, I want to separate mixed string Unicode and ascii char as a separate words with white space.
example:
$inputstr = "ලංකාABCDE TEST1දිස්ත්‍රික් වාණිජ්‍යTEMP මණ්ඩලය # MNOPQ";
function separatestring($inputstr)
{
//do some code
return $inputstr;
}
echo separatestring($inputstr);
//OUTPUT String = ලංකා ABCDE TEST1 දිස්ත්‍රික් වාණිජ්‍ය TEMP මණ්ඩලය # MNOPQ
i have try with preg_replace with Regex and several looping methods but any method did not success. please help me on this. Thanks All!

Answer 1

This works for me:
$inputstr = "ලංකාABCDE TEST1දිස්ත්‍රික් වාණිජ්‍යTEMP මණ්ඩලය # MNOPQ";
function separatestring($inputstr)
{
$re = '#\s+|(?<=[^\x20-\x7f])(?=[\x20-\x7f])'
. '|(?<=[\x20-\x7f])(?=[^\x20-\x7f])#';
$array = preg_split($re, $inputstr);
return array_filter($array);
}
echo implode(" ", separatestring($inputstr));
//OUTPUT String = ලංකා ABCDE TEST1 දිස්ත්‍රික් වාණිජ්‍ය TEMP මණ්ඩලය # MNOPQ
The regexp for splitting means the following:
# — start regexp (delimeter character),
\s+ — split on one or more whitespace character (counting the whitespace as the separator),
| — or,
(?<=[^\x20-\x7f])(?=[\x20-\x7f]) — split on a border between non-ASCII and ASCII characters (not counting them as separators),
| — or,
(?<=[\x20-\x7f])(?=[^\x20-\x7f]) — split on a border between ASCII and non-ASCII characters (not counting them as separators),
# — end regexp (delimeter character).
Unfortunately, my regular expression is not too elegant, so sometimes the empty strings are returned (because whitespace is also an ASCII character). I’ve put array_filter to fix this, but a more elegant solution might exist.
I’ve written separatestring in such a way that it returns in array. If you want a string, replace the return statement this way:
return implode(" ", array_filter($array));