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         


        

Answer 1

Here is one way, splitting the string and running a regex once, then parsing the results to see which segments were captured as the split (and therefore only whitespace), or which ones are words:

$temp = preg_split('/(\s+)/', $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE | PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);

$spaces = array();
$words = array_reduce( $temp, function( &$result, $item) use ( &$spaces) {
    if( strlen( trim( $item)) === 0) {
        $spaces[] = strlen( $item);
    } else {
        $result[] = $item;
    }
    return $result;
}, array());

You can see from this demo that $words is:

Array
(
    [0] => This
    [1] => is
    [2] => a
    [3] => string
)

And $spaces is:

Array
(
    [0] => 1
    [1] => 1
    [2] => 4
)