Dialogue Parser - php

Question

I have a dialogue file that looks like so:
CHARACTER MOOD PROMPT RESPONSE TEXT LEVEL PATH
As you can see, everything is separated by spaces. The trick comes in when
PROMPT RESPONSE TEXT is supposed to be one header (read together) all heading groups are separated by no more than two spaces while each heading is separated by 3+ spaces. What I am trying to do is take this line and add it into an array much like this:
array(4) => {
[0]=> string(9) "CHARACTER",
[1]=> string(4) "MOOD",
[2]=> string(21) "PROMPT RESPONSE TEXT",
[3]=> string(5) "LEVEL",
[4]=> string(4) "PATH"
}
I am trying to use preg_split with the following regexp /\s\s\s+/ but it does nothing more than yield an empty array. I assume that the regexp would split if on any amount of spaces equal to or greater than 3. Is there something more to this?

Answer 1

You can use the following, this looks for whitespace ( at least 3 times )
$results = preg_split('/\s{3,}/', $text);
var_dump($results);
Output
array(5) {
[0]=> string(9) "CHARACTER"
[1]=> string(4) "MOOD"
[2]=> string(21) "PROMPT RESPONSE TEXT"
[3]=> string(5) "LEVEL"
[4]=> string(4) "PATH"
}

Answer 2

If you dont want to have the overhead of loading the regex engine you could use this
<?php
$t = 'CHARACTER MOOD PROMPT RESPONSE TEXT LEVEL PATH';
$u = explode(' ',$t);
print_r($u);
$new_u = array();
foreach( $u as $key => $val) {
if ($val != '') {
$new_u[] = trim($val);
}
}
print_r($new_u);
Results
Array
(
[0] => CHARACTER
[1] =>
[2] => MOOD
[3] =>
[4] =>
[5] => PROMPT RESPONSE TEXT
[6] =>
[7] => LEVEL
[8] =>
[9] =>
[10] => PATH
)
Array
(
[0] => CHARACTER
[1] => MOOD
[2] => PROMPT RESPONSE TEXT
[3] => LEVEL
[4] => PATH
)