Creating an array from a string separated by spaces

I have an input where a user may type in multiple words, and they are told to separate it with a space. So input may look like this:

foo

or like this:

foo bar php js

How can I check for spaces, and if there are spaces, split the words, then put it all into an array? I'll loop through that array in my program. I'm just n开发者_JAVA百科ew to string handling like this.

See explode

// Example 1
$pizza  = "piece1 piece2 piece3 piece4 piece5 piece6";
$pieces = explode(" ", $pizza);
echo $pieces[0]; // piece1
echo $pieces[1]; // piece2

Yes explode will do every thing for you and foreach can be used to retrieve the values from the array again. Your complete code will be something like following one:

$str = "foo bar php js";
$arr =  explode(" ", $str);

//print all the value which are in the array
foreach($arr as $v){
    echo $v;
}

Hope this will help you.

Daniel has already posted about the splitting part, let me add the checking for space part also.

$pizza  = "piece1 piece2 piece3 piece4 piece5 piece6";
$pizza = trim($pizza);

if(strpos($pizza, " ") !== false)

    $pieces = explode(" ", $pizza);
    echo $pieces[0]; // piece1
    echo $pieces[1]; // piece2

}else{

    echo $pizza;

}

Your sample input is relatively calm. If you are trusting your users to perfectly enter qualifying substrings which are always delimited by exactly one space, then the best choice is explode().

If the user input can vary beyond just lowercase letters or you want to validate while extracting, there are other more appropriate functions to call.

Understanding you business logic will determine the best solution for this task.

A demonstration:

$input = "foo bar, php js  double-space apo'strophe 9 ";

echo 'explode(): '; var_export(explode(' ', $input));

echo "\npreg_split(): "; var_export(preg_split('/ +/', $input, null, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY));

echo "\nstr_word_count(): "; var_export(str_word_count($input, 1));

echo "\npreg_match_all(): "; var_export(preg_match_all('/[a-z]+/', $input, $output) ? $output[0]: []);

Output:

explode(): array (
  0 => 'foo',
  1 => 'bar,',
  2 => 'php',
  3 => 'js',
  4 => '',
  5 => 'double-space',
  6 => 'apo\'strophe',
  7 => '9',
  8 => '',
)
preg_split(): array (
  0 => 'foo',
  1 => 'bar,',
  2 => 'php',
  3 => 'js',
  4 => 'double-space',
  5 => 'apo\'strophe',
  6 => '9',
)
str_word_count(): array (
  0 => 'foo',
  1 => 'bar',
  2 => 'php',
  3 => 'js',
  4 => 'double-space',
  5 => 'apo\'strophe',
)
preg_match_all(): array (
  0 => 'foo',
  1 => 'bar',
  2 => 'php',
  3 => 'js',
  4 => 'double',
  5 => 'space',
  6 => 'apo',
  7 => 'strophe',
)

For optimization purposes, i think its better to remove excess spaces like double spaces before using explode function. for example: if you have "foo bar php js " this string must become "foo bar php js" before using explode function. you may try this code:

$charSet = preg_replace(array('/\s{2,}/', '/[\t\n]/'), ' ', $charSet);
$charSet = rtrim($charSet);
$charSetArray = explode(" ", $charSet);
echo $charSetArray[0];
echo $charSetArray[1];

As Daniel said, explode() is perfect for this kind of situation. You may also want to look at preg_split() (purely for future reference) as it accepts a regex rather than just a simple delimiter and will allow you to break up input on a more complex pattern.

This will work if there is no space between the input string.`

    $pieces = explode(" ", $pizza);
    if(count($pieces > 1)) {
        foreach($pieces as $piece) {
            echo $piece;
        }
    }
    else {
        echo $userInput;
    }
?>`

Explanation :
After exploding the string into pieces. Firstly it checks if we have more items in array i.e. $pieces if yes it will print via foreach loop otherwise it will simply print the user input.