Split variable content into multiple paragraphs - php

Question

Hey there,
I have this little php code:
<p class="category_text"><? echo $category_text; ?></p>
I waht to split the $category_text and get something like this:
This is sentence 1 of category_text
This is sentence 2 of category_text
and so on...
$category_text has about 300 words and lets say 6 sentences. How could I split the text in multiple paragraphs (delimited by the stop sings ".")
Thank you very much!

Answer 1

echo '<p class="category_text">'
. implode('</p><p class="category_text">', explode('.',$string))
.'</p>';

Answer 2

You can just replace the "." by the tag "":
<p class="category_text"><? echo str_replace('.', '.<br />', $category_text); ?></p>
It's not a perfect solution! But if you text is simple enough this little trick should work.
For example if you have a line with 3 dots:
$category_text = "Ok...";
It will show up like that:
OK.
.
.
Also if your sentences finish by "?" or "!" you can also use that:
<p class="category_text"><? echo str_replace(array('.', '!', '?'), array('.<br />', '!<br />', '?<br />'), $category_text); ?></p>
PS: My solution will create one paragraph "" but with multiple line break

Answer 3

Try creating an array, and then output the lines one by one. A sentence ending in ... would still be recognized as still ends in ". ".
$sentences = explode('. ', $category_text)
foreach($sentences as $val)
{
echo $val . ".<br /><br />";
}

Answer 4

You want to split a text into sentences, which is not trivial - using explode(".", $string) does often not give good results.
Search Stackoverflow for "php split sentence", or directly try the solution to PHP: Parse document / text into sentences :
http://www.zubrag.com/scripts/text-splitter.php
Once you have an array with sentences, use
echo '<p>' . implode('</p><p>', $sentences) . '</p>';
to echo them out.