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

Question

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 1

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);

Answer 2

<?php
$text = "We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed. Provide details. Write clearly and simply.";
$array = explode('.',$text);
$text = $array[0];
?>

Answer 3

My previous regex seemed to work in the tester but not in actual PHP. I have edited this answer to provide full, working PHP code, and an improved regex.

$string = 'A simple test!';
var_dump(get_first_sentence($string));

$string = 'A simple test without a character to end the sentence';
var_dump(get_first_sentence($string));

$string = '... But what about me?';
var_dump(get_first_sentence($string));

$string = 'We at StackOverflow.com prefer prices below US$ 7.50. Really, we do.';
var_dump(get_first_sentence($string));

$string = 'This will probably break after this pause .... or won\'t it?';
var_dump(get_first_sentence($string));

function get_first_sentence($string) {
    $array = preg_split('/(^.*\w+.*[\.\?!][\s])/', $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
    // You might want to count() but I chose not to, just add   
    return trim($array[0] . $array[1]);
}

Answer 4

Try this:

$content = "My name is Younas. I live on the pakistan. My email is **fromyounas@gmail.com** and skype name is "**fromyounas**". I loved to work in **IOS development** and website development . ";

$dot = ".";

//find first dot position     

$position = stripos ($content, $dot); 

//if there's a dot in our soruce text do

if($position) { 

    //prepare offset

    $offset = $position + 1; 

    //find second dot using offset

    $position2 = stripos ($content, $dot, $offset); 

    $result = substr($content, 0, $position2);

   //add a dot

   echo $result . '.'; 

}

Output is:

My name is Younas. I live on the pakistan.

Answer 5

current(explode(".",$input));

Answer 6

I'd probably use any of the multitudes of substring/string-split functions in PHP (some mentioned here already). But also look for ". " OR ".\n" (and possibly ".\n\r") instead of just ".". Just in case for whatever reason, the sentence contains a period that isn't followed by a space. I think it will harden the likelihood of you getting genuine results.

Example, searching for just "." on:

"I like stackoverflow.com."

Will get you:

"I like stackoverflow."

When really, I'm sure you'd prefer:

"I like stackoverflow.com."

And once you have that basic search, you'll probably come across one or two occasions where it may miss something. Tune as you run with it!

Answer 7

Try this:

reset(explode('.', $s, 2));