How could I find all whitespaces excluding the ones between quotes?

Question

I need to split string by spaces, but phrase in quotes should be preserved unsplitted. Example:

  word1 word2 \"this is a phrase\" word3 word4 \"this is a s         


        

Answer 1

Anybody want to benchmark tokenizing vs. regex? My guess is the explode() function is a little too hefty for any speed benefit. Nonetheless, here's another method:

(edited because I forgot the else case for storing the quoted string)

$str = 'word1 word2 "this is a phrase" word3 word4 "this is a second phrase" word5';

// initialize storage array
$arr = array();
// initialize count
$count = 0;
// split on quote
$tok = strtok($str, '"');
while ($tok !== false) {
    // even operations not in quotes
    $arr = ($count % 2 == 0) ? 
                               array_merge($arr, explode(' ', trim($tok))) :
                               array_merge($arr, array(trim($tok)));
    $tok = strtok('"');
    ++$count;
}

// output results
var_dump($arr);