How to select first 10 words of a sentence?

php string substring trim
AAA picture AAA · May 10, 2011 · Viewed 80.7k times · Source

How do I, from an output, only select the first 10 words?

Answer

Kelly picture Kelly · May 10, 2011 
implode(' ', array_slice(explode(' ', $sentence), 0, 10));

To add support for other word breaks like commas and dashes, preg_match gives a quick way and doesn't require splitting the string:

function get_words($sentence, $count = 10) {
  preg_match("/(?:\w+(?:\W+|$)){0,$count}/", $sentence, $matches);
  return $matches[0];
}

As Pebbl mentions, PHP doesn't handle UTF-8 or Unicode all that well, so if that is a concern then you can replace \w for [^\s,\.;\?\!] and \W for [\s,\.;\?\!].

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
Getting the first character of a string with $str[0]

I want to get the first letter of a string and I've noticed that $str[0] works great. I am just not sure whether this is 'good practice', as that notation is generally used with arrays. This feature doesn't seem to …

Read More
PHP substring extraction. Get the string before the first '/' or the whole string

I am trying to extract a substring. I need some help with doing it in PHP. Here are some sample strings I am working with and the results I need: home/cat1/subcat2 => home test/cat2 => test startpage =&…

Read More