show first sentence of a string

[Anon]

I'm trying to find the break up a string to show only the first sentence...

I have an item description stored as $string, and I want an abreviated description, showing only the first sentence (which will then be abbreviated to x characters + ... later)
The problem is, I've been going around in circles trying to find the right way to break up the description.

the best I've come up with is to use
strpos();
to find the positions of the various sentence-breaking punctiations ('.','!','?',':',';') - but I can't find a [short] way to find which is the first occuring one...

my code so far:

function shortdesc($item) {
$period=strpos($item, ".");
if ($period===false) {
$period=10000;
}
$exclam=strpos($item, "!");
if ($exclam===false) {
$exlam=10000;
}
$question=strpos($item, "?");
if ($question===false) {
$question=10000;
}
$semicol=strpos($item, ";");
if ($semicol===false) {
$semicol=10000;
}
$colon=strpos($item, ":");
if ($colon===false) {
$colon=10000;
}
// find some way to find the string with smallest value to then execute an explode() command

}

Any thoughts?

[Anon]

<?
$string = 'This is a sentence. This is another one.';
$punc_array = array ('.', '!', '?', ';', ':');
foreach ($punc_array as $value)
{
if (strstr ($string, $value)) {$punc = $value;}
}
$string = explode ($punc, $string);
echo $string[0] . $punc;
?>

ouputs "This is a sentence."

[mykone]

devin.. you should be able to use an
eregi() function too can't you?

$str = eregi("[a-zA-Z0-9]+[!:;?.]+","\1",$str);

[Anon]

$firstsentence=strtok($item,".!?;:");
Of course this loses the last (sentence-terminating) character. If you want it, then

$firstsentence.=substr($item,strlen($firstsentence),1);

will tack it back on.

[Anon]

strtok() was what I was looking for - a sort of explode, but where one could specify a number of delimiters.

Cheers folks