Regular expression to find last word in sentence

Question

How can I find last word in a sentence with a regular expression?

Answer 1

If you need to find the last word in a string, then do this:

m/
    (\w+)      (?# Match a word, store its value into pattern memory)

    [.!?]?     (?# Some strings might hold a sentence. If so, this)
               (?# component will match zero or one punctuation)
               (?# characters)

    \s*        (?# Match trailing whitespace using the * because there)
               (?# might not be any)

    $          (?# Anchor the match to the end of the string)
/x;

After this statement, $1 will hold the last word in the string. You may need to expand the character class, [.!?], by adding more punctuation.

in PHP: