php explode: split string into words by using space a delimiter

Question

$str = "This is a    string";
$words = explode(" ", $str);

Works fine, but spaces still go into array:

$words === array ('This', 'is', 'a', '', '', '', 'string');//true

I would prefer to have words only with no spaces and keep the information about the number of spaces separate.

$words === array ('This', 'is', 'a', 'string');//true
$spaces === array(1,1,4);//true

Just added: (1, 1, 4) means one space after the first word, one space after the second word and 4 spaces after the third word.

Is there any way to do it fast?

Thank you.

Answer 1

For splitting the String into an array, you should use preg_split:

$string = 'This is a    string';
$data   = preg_split('/\s+/', $string);

Your second part (counting spaces):

$string = 'This is a    string';
preg_match_all('/\s+/', $string, $matches);
$result = array_map('strlen', $matches[0]);// [1, 1, 4]