Parse words in PHP - php

Question

From the string of words, can I get only the words with a capitalized first letter? For example, I have this string:
Page and Brin originally nicknamed THEIR new search engine "BackRub",
because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a
site.
I need to get: Page, Brin, THEIR, BackRub

Answer 1

A non-regex solution (based on Mark Baker's comment):
$result = array_filter(str_word_count($str, 1), function($item) {
return ctype_upper($item[0]);
});
print_r($result);
Output:
Array
(
[0] => Page
[2] => Brin
[5] => THEIR
[9] => BackRub
)

Answer 2

You can match that with
preg_match("/[A-Z]{1}[a-zA-z]*/um", $searchText)
You can see on php.net how preg_match can be applied.
http://ca1.php.net/preg_match
EDIT, TO ADD EXAMPLE
Here's an example of how to get the array with full matches
$searchText = 'Page and Brin originally nicknamed THEIR new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.';
preg_match_all("/[A-Z]{1}[a-zA-z]*/um", $searchText, $matches );
var_dump( $matches );
The output is:
array(1) {
[0]=>
array(4) {
[0]=>
string(4) "Page"
[1]=>
string(4) "Brin"
[2]=>
string(5) "THEIR"
[3]=>
string(7) "BackRub"
}
}

Answer 3

The way I would do it is explode by space, ucfirst the exploded strings, and check them against the original.
here is what I mean:
$str = 'Page and Brin originally nicknamed THEIR new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.';
$strings = explode(' ', $str);
$i = 0;
$out = array();
foreach($strings as $s)
{
if($strings[$i] == ucfirst($s))
{
$out[] = $s;
}
++$i;
}
var_dump($out);
http://codepad.org/QwrS4HpE

Answer 4

I would use strtok function (http://pl1.php.net/strtok), which returns the words in the string, one by one. You can specify the delimiter between words:
$string = 'Page and Brin originally nicknamed THEIR new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.';
$delimiter = ' ,."'; // specify valid delimiters here (add others as needed)
$capitalized_words = array(); // array to hold the found words
$tok = strtok($string,$delimiter); // get first token
while ($tok !== false) {
$first_char = substr($tok,0,1);
if (strtoupper($first_char)===$first_char) {
// this word ($tok) is capitalized, store it
$capitalized_words[] = $tok;
}
$tok = strtok($delimiter); // get next token
}
var_dump($capitalized_words); // print the capitalized words found
This prints:
array(4) {
[0]=>
string(4) "Page"
[1]=>
string(4) "Brin"
[2]=>
string(5) "THEIR"
[3]=>
string(7) "BackRub"
}
Good luck!
Only drawback I can see is that it doesn't handle multibyte. If you have only English characters, then you're ok. If you have international characters, a modified/different solution may be needed.

Answer 5

You can do this using explode and loop through with regex:
$string = 'Page and Brin originally nicknamed THEIR new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.';
$list = explode(' ',$string);
$matches = array();
foreach($list as $str) {
if(preg_match('/[A-Z]+[a-zA-Z]*/um',$str) $matches[] = $str;
}
print_r($matches);