Delimit string by whitespaces

Question

What would be the appropriate regex to delimit a string by all whitespaces? There can also be more than one whitespace between two token and it should ignore whitespaces at the end.

What I have so far:

<?php
$tags = "unread dev     test1   ";
$tagsArr = preg_split("/ +/", $tags);
foreach ($tagsArr as $value) {
  echo $value . ";";
}

This gives me the following output:

"unread;dev;test1;;"

As you can see it doesn't ignore the whitespaces at the end because the correct output should be:

"unread;dev;test1;"

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 27 '12 at 20:58

7

You can ignore empty entries using the flag PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY:

$tagsArr = preg_split("/ +/", $tags, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);

Demo: http://ideone.com/1hrNJ

answered Aug 27 '12 at 20:58

mellamokb

56,094
12
110
136

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 27 '12 at 20:58

6

Just use the trim function first to cut away the white space at the end.

$trimmed_tags = trim($tags);

answered Aug 27 '12 at 20:58

Zevi Sternlicht

5,399
19
31

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 28 '12 at 00:39

2

Fastest way:

$tagsArr = array_filter( explode(' ', $tags) );

answered Aug 28 '12 at 00:39

iimos

4,767
2
33
35

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 27 '12 at 21:01

It appears you wish to retain white space throughout the string, but remove from the end (to prevent this last annoying semi colon. If I have understood correctly so far, this sounds like the perfect use for the trim command:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.trim.php

Delimit string by whitespaces

4 Answers4