Does anyone have a PHP snippet of code for grabbing the first "sentence" in a string?

php string code-snippets
FilmJ picture FilmJ · Jul 16, 2009 · Viewed 12.4k times · Source

If I have a description like:

"We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed. Provide details. Write clearly and simply."

And all I want is:

"We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed."

I figure I would search for a regular expression, like "[.!\?]", determine the strpos and then do a substr from the main string, but I imagine it's a common thing to do, so hoping someone has a snippet lying around.

Answer

Ian Elliott picture Ian Elliott · Jul 16, 2009

A slightly more costly expression, however will be more adaptable if you wish to select multiple types of punctuation as sentence terminators. 

$sentence = preg_replace('/([^?!.]*.).*/', '\\1', $string);

Find termination characters followed by a space

$sentence = preg_replace('/(.*?[?!.](?=\s|$)).*/', '\\1', $string);

Related questions

How do I check if a string contains a specific word?

Consider: $a = 'How are you?'; if ($a contains 'are') echo 'true'; Suppose I have the code above, what is the correct way to write the statement if ($a contains 'are')?

Read More
PHP equivalent of .NET/Java's toString()

How do I convert the value of a PHP variable to string? I was looking for something better than concatenating with an empty string: $myText = $myVar . ''; Like the ToString() method in Java or .NET.

Read More
PHP random string generator

I'm trying to create a randomized string in PHP, and I get absolutely no output with this: <?php function RandomString() { $characters = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'; $randstring = ''; for ($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++) { $randstring = $characters[rand(0, strlen($characters))]; } return $randstring; } RandomString(); echo $…

Read More