JavaScript break sentence by words

Question

What's a good strategy to get full words into an array with its succeeding character.

Example.

This is an amazing sentence.

Array(
[0] => This 
[1] => is
[2] => an
[3] => amazing
[4] => sentence.
)

Elements 0 - 3 would have a succeeding space, as a period succeeds the 4th element.

I need you to split these by spacing character, Then once width of element with injected array elements reaches X, Break into a new line.

Please, gawd don't give tons of code. I prefer to write my own just tell me how you would do it.

I'd take the approach provided in this answer http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4514144/js-string-split-without-removing-the-delimiters. But for your case change the `var newstringreplaced = string.replace(/d/gi, ",d");` to `var newstringreplaced = string.replace(/\s/gi, " ,");`. **Edit:** Should be advised this approach is only useful if your original string doesn't have a `,`. I suppose this solution is much safer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/4514241/1417588 — Suvi Vignarajah, Aug 27 '13 at 19:12
Use the javascript [split](http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_split.asp) function. — saurabh, Aug 27 '13 at 19:00

Isaac · Answer 1 · 2017-07-21T07:14:59.050

78

Similar to Ravi's answer, use match, but use the word boundary \b in the regex to split on word boundaries:

'This is  a test.  This is only a test.'.match(/\b(\w+)\b/g)

yields

["This", "is", "a", "test", "This", "is", "only", "a", "test"]

or

'This is  a test.  This is only a test.'.match(/\b(\w+\W+)/g)

yields

["This ", "is  ", "a ", "test.  ", "This ", "is ", "only ", "a ", "test."]

edited Jul 21 '17 at 07:14

answered Apr 08 '16 at 19:58

Isaac

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This is indeed the best answer, as split by space is not really usable for real-life scenarios. Well, unless you don't use punctuation and always use single whitespace. – Alex.Me Sep 27 '17 at 09:37
7

That converts "won't" into "won" and "t". This allows contractions: str.match(/\b(\w+)'?(\w+)?\b/g) – Thomas David Kehoe Feb 17 '18 at 23:03
english words only :( – iiic Jun 17 '20 at 12:36
1

\b does not work with non ASCII chars. For example 'é'.match(/\b(\w+)\b/g) returns null – Clement Feb 20 '23 at 19:49
@Clement Something like `/(\p{L}+\P{L}+)/` might work with ES2018 (or PCRE), but it's unclear to me whether there's any real support for that. Ref: https://stackoverflow.com/a/48902765/291280 – Isaac Mar 14 '23 at 19:14

score 68 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 27 '13 at 18:55

68

Just use split:

var str = "This is an amazing sentence.";
var words = str.split(" ");
console.log(words);
//["This", "is", "an", "amazing", "sentence."]

and if you need it with a space, why don't you just do that? (use a loop afterwards)

var str = "This is an amazing sentence.";
var words = str.split(" ");
for (var i = 0; i < words.length - 1; i++) {
    words[i] += " ";
}
console.log(words);
//["This ", "is ", "an ", "amazing ", "sentence."]

Oh, and sleep well!

answered Aug 27 '13 at 18:55

h2ooooooo

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@cars10 Changed the answer - does this fix it? – h2ooooooo Aug 27 '13 at 18:58
3

@cars10 why would you need the blanks at the end of each word? If you want them back when you concat your string just `.join(' ');` – Dennis Martinez Aug 27 '13 at 18:59
I was just typing this up. Good, quick response. – EnigmaRM Aug 27 '13 at 18:59
Good answer :) i need the spaces because the users sentence has spaces and i plan to re output their sentence without having to declare a space in the loop. :) THANK U – THE AMAZING Aug 27 '13 at 19:05
2

@user2716649 As Dennis Martinez mentioned, you can simply use [`words.join(" ")`](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/join) to get `This is an amazing sentence.` again. – h2ooooooo Aug 27 '13 at 19:06
how about multiple spaces between words!? ... it will put empty string elements inside array ... "asd asd asd 00 0".split(' ').filter(Boolean) solves that – user2846569 Mar 08 '18 at 12:02
@user2846569 You can just use regex - `string.split(/\s+/g)` – h2ooooooo Mar 08 '18 at 14:35
@h2ooooooo nope ... check " a b b ".split(/\s+/g) ... ["", "a", "b", "b", ""] – user2846569 Mar 08 '18 at 15:18
@user2846569 `' a b b '.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, '').split(/\s+/g);` – h2ooooooo Mar 08 '18 at 15:19
and don't forget `map`. If you did need to add spaces to each word, then `map` is your friend. – ctrl-alt-delor Dec 28 '19 at 09:48

score 20 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 27 '13 at 19:04

20

try this

var words = str.replace(/([ .,;]+)/g,'$1§sep§').split('§sep§');

This will

insert a marker §sep§ after every chosen delimiter [ .,;]+
split the string at the marked positions, thereby preserving the actual delimiters.

answered Aug 27 '13 at 19:04

Carsten Massmann

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Ravi Rajendra · Answer 4 · 2018-11-07T20:07:41.683

8

If you need spaces and the dots the easiest would be.

"This is an amazing sentence.".match(/.*?[\.\s]+?/g);

the result would be

['This ','is ','an ','amazing ','sentence.']

edited Nov 07 '18 at 20:07

answered Aug 27 '13 at 19:13

Ravi Rajendra

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score 7 · Answer 5 · answered Nov 12 '20 at 03:07

7

Use split and filter to remove leading and trailing whitespaces.

let str = '     This is an amazing sentence.  ',
  words = str.split(' ').filter(w => w !== '');

console.log(words);

answered Nov 12 '20 at 03:07

Penny Liu

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score 3 · Answer 6 · answered Aug 27 '13 at 19:01

Here is an option if you wanted to include the space and complete in O(N)

var str = "This is an amazing sentence.";
var words = [];
var buf = "";
for(var i = 0; i < str.length; i++) {
    buf += str[i];
    if(str[i] == " ") {
        words.push(buf);
        buf = "";
    }
}

if(buf.length > 0) {
    words.push(buf);
}

score 3 · Answer 7 · answered Feb 20 '23 at 20:41

The following solution splits words, not only by space, but also other types of spaces and punctuation characters. In addition, it works with non ASCII characters.

It matches words by considering only characters that belong to certain categories of characters. It allows letters (L), numbers (N), symbols (S) and marks (M) so it matches quite a broad set but you can adjust if you need a different set of characters. Other categories such as punctuations (P) and separators (Z) are not included and will therefore not match.

input.match(/[\p{L}\p{N}\p{S}\p{M}]+/gu)

Example

' \t a 件数  ,;-asd'.match(/[\p{L}\p{N}\p{S}\p{M}]+/gu)

Returns ['a', '件数', '', 'asd']

score 1 · Answer 8 · answered Nov 07 '18 at 05:35

1

This can be done with lodash _.words:

var str = 'This is an amazing sentence.';
console.log(_.words(str, /[^, ]+/g));

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/lodash.js/4.17.11/lodash.min.js"></script>

answered Nov 07 '18 at 05:35

Penny Liu

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score 1 · Answer 9 · answered Apr 08 '21 at 16:28

1

It can be done with split function:

"This is an amazing sentence.".split(' ')

answered Apr 08 '21 at 16:28

Maciej Bledkowski

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JavaScript break sentence by words

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