Space out combined words

scrupul0us

I'm working with a form that I was handed to code process for

All of the questions names assigned to each question are pushed together like this:

WasYourMealWarm

What I'd like to do is break it apart to:

Was Your Meal Warm

What's the most efficient way to accomplish this?

Thanks =)

halojoy

would be to use some preg_replace()
there has to be some flag for uppercase chars

I am sorry I am not so good with regex,
but sure Weedpacket or some other will solve this.
🙂

Kudose

I seem to lack the regex skills needed ...

<?php

    $text = "ThisYoungManHasAFewTricksToo";

    function parseString($string){
            $len = strlen($string);
            $ret = NULL;
            for($i = 0; $i<$len; $i++){
                    if(ctype_upper($string[$i])){
                            if($i > 0) $ret .= ' ';
                            $ret .= $string[$i];
                    } elseif(ctype_lower($string[$i])){
                            // in a word
                            $ret .= $string[$i];
                    }
            }
            return $ret;
    }

    echo parseString($text);

Weedpacket

preg_replace('/(?<=[a-z])[A-Z]/', ' $0', $camelCasedWord)

Kudose

Weedpacket;10940062 wrote:
preg_replace('/(?<=[a-z])[A-Z]/', ' $0', $camelCasedWord)

I am impressed and have some reading to do.

Weedpacket

If the strings might contain uppercase letters outside the a-z or A-Z ranges...

/(?<=\p{Ll})\p{Lu}/

scrupul0us

Weedpacket;10940062 wrote:
preg_replace('/(?<=[a-z])[A-Z]/', ' $0', $camelCasedWord)

first off thanks!

secondly, can you explain whats going on in that regex so I can understand?

NogDog

My solution to deal with single-character words:

$text = 'ThisIsATest';
echo preg_replace('/(?<!^)(?=[A-Z])/', ' ', $text);

PS:
"(?<!" = start of negative look-behind assertion, in this case checking that the capital letter is not at the start of the string
"(?=" = start of positive look-ahead assertion, in this case looking for any capital letter from A to Z
Therefore, it matches on the non-character position (or zero-length string?) between two characters, where the character on the right is a capital letter.

johanafm

The explanation for Weedpacket's regexp is similar to that of NogDog's.
The first difference is that the uc letter must be preceeded by an lc letter compared to must not be preceeded by start of string (^). . I.e. NogDog's would insert a space between 1A => 1 A, where Weedpacket's wouldn't.
The other differnece is that Weedpacket actually matches the uc letter, [A-Z], and then the replacement is a space followed by the pattern match: ' $0', while NogDog's pattern doen't match any character at all. His just asserts that there is anything other than start of string followed by a UC letter, and inserts a space between those two characters.