[RESOLVED] Help with building function

[Sayian]

Im need some help removing some common words from a string in this function

$topic = 'My wonderfull day at the beach';

function get_related_topics($topic) {

$common_words = array('is','and','but','also','the','as','im','into','therefore',
'of','because','to','from','with','there','my','your','am','same','be','these',
'those','while','a','out','in','at','still','is','many','who','both','are','about',
'on');

$topic_words = explode(' ',$topic);

foreach($topic_words as $topic_word) {

	if(!strpos($common_words,$topic_word)) {

		$clean_words[] = $topic_word;

	}

}

print_r($clean_words);

}

Im trying to remove the common words from $topic, and leave the rest ...

Ive tried mutiple ways, with str_replce, and strpos to test .. but this doesnt work

what am i doing wrong?

Print_r should only print "wonderfull day beach"

[obsidian]

i'd recommend going about it just slightly from a different angle so as to ignore any punctuation or other errant spaces, etc that might be thrown into the search. try something like this:

function get_related_topics($topic)
{
  $common_words = array('is','and','but','also','the','as','im','into','therefore',
    'of','because','to','from','with','there','my','your','am','same','be','these',
    'those','while','a','out','in','at','still','is','many','who','both','are','about',
    'on'); 

  // get all whole words out of the string
  preg_match_all('|\b[a-z]+\b|i', $topic, $match);

  // set result array to load with clean words
  $words = array();

  // loop through words and compare to $common_words
  foreach ($match[0] as $x)
    // if the word (lower case) is not in $common_words, add to your results
    if (!in_array(strtolower($x), $common_words))
      $words[] = $x;

  print_r($words);
}

$topic = "My wonderful day at the beach!";
get_related_topics($topic);

hope this helps!

[remnant]

I don't think you can use an array as your haystack in strpos

Replace

    if(!strpos($common_words,$topic_word)) { 

        $clean_words[] = $topic_word; 

} 

with

if (!in_array($topic_work, $common_words)) {
}

You could even just do this to simplify the whole process:

$topic = 'My wonderfull day at the beach'; 

function get_related_topics($topic) { 

$common_words = array('is','and','but','also','the','as','im','into','therefore', 
'of','because','to','from','with','there','my','your','am','same','be','these', 
'those','while','a','out','in','at','still','is','many','who','both','are','about', 
'on'); 

// Make the sentence an array as well
$topic = explode (" ", $topic);

// Create an array of the words present in topics but not present in common_words
$compare = array_diff ($topic, $common_words);
}

[Sayian]

Thank you for all your help! I appriciate it, I have it working!