Split text variable into 3 parts

luv_

I have an idea of where I need to go with this but I’m a brand spanking newbie. A push in the right direction would be helpful!

I have a variable that contains several paragraphs of text. I need to count it’s length, divide it into 3 and set each of the 3 parts to a new variable. I currently have code to count its words and divide that total. However I do not know how to select the first x words, the second x words and the third x words, assigning each to a new variable.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
luv

technofreak

You can make use of a reg exp to find the 'n' number of words you want to cut out, and extract that set of string. U can easily extract the string in 3 parts with the help of regular expression and PHP's PCRE functions. Am also a newbie like you, so I can't help a great deal on reg-ex, but you can learn about how to do it with pgrep 🙂

bogu

Can u add the script that "count its words and divide that total" so wee can help u "select the first x words, the second x words and the third x words, assigning each to a new variable"

Weedpacket

For counting words in a paragraph, it may be easier to count the spaces between words, and add one. [man]preg_match_all/man will tell you how many times its pattern matches in the string, and with the PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE flag set, tell you where those matches were (so that you know where to cut).

Well, maybe not that much easier. To find all the sequences of consecutive whitespace (between words)the pattern is

/\s+/

while to match the words (including punctuation, btw) themselves it's

/\S+/

Swings and roundabouts, I suppose.

barand

or you could use str_word_count().

However, try

//change newlines to space
$txt = str_replace("\r\n\r\n", ' ', $txt); // if Win and 2 newlines between paras
// create an array of words
$words = explode(' ', $txt);

$k = count($words);
$k3 = ceil($k/3);

// buikd into 3 parts
$new = array();
for ($i=0; $i<$k; $i+=$k3) {
	$new[] = join(' ', array_slice($words,$i, $k3));
}

// view results 
echo $new[0], '<br><br>';
echo $new[1], '<br><br>';
echo $new[2], '<br><br>';

luv_

You guys are awesome. It amazes me how many ways there are to approach the same problem.

barand - I follow most of what you wrote and it's almost exactly what I was trying to create. I just have a couple newbish questions but I think I can figure them out by doing some research (rtfm). I cant say I would have thought to put it in an array.

The only real change I made was turning the number of divisions into a variable.

It works pretty close to what I was looking for. http://klinetimes.com/ Although on smaller screen sizes the cols are not quite even. Not a big enough deal that I'm going to worry about at this moment in time. If I end up with spare time I may come revisit it.

Thanks again!
-luv

barand

You might want to try an alternative approach based on the number of characters, using wordwrap() to break the text on the nearest word boundary.

$txt = str_replace("\r\n\r\n", ' ', $txt); // if Win and 2 newlines between paras

$k = strlen($txt);  // get no of characters
$k3 = ceil($k/3);

$new = explode('|', wordwrap($txt, $k3, '|'));

// view results
echo $new[0], '<br><br>';
echo $new[1], '<br><br>';
echo $new[2], '<br><br>';