Explode string by one or more spaces or tabs

Question

How can I explode a string by one or more spaces or tabs?

Example:

A      B      C      D

I want to make this an array.

Answer 1

$parts = preg_split('/\s+/', $str);

Answer 2

To separate by tabs:

$comp = preg_split("/\t+/", $var);

To separate by spaces/tabs/newlines:

$comp = preg_split('/\s+/', $var);

To seperate by spaces alone:

$comp = preg_split('/ +/', $var);

Answer 3

This works:

$string = 'A   B C          D';
$arr = preg_split('/\s+/', $string);

Answer 4

The author asked for explode, to you can use explode like this

$resultArray = explode("\t", $inputString);

Note: you must used double quote, not single.

Answer 5

I think you want preg_split:

$input = "A  B C   D";
$words = preg_split('/\s+/', $input);
var_dump($words);

Answer 6

instead of using explode, try preg_split: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-split.php

Answer 7

In order to account for full width space such as

full　width

you can extend Bens answer to this:

$searchValues = preg_split("@[\s+　]@u", $searchString);

Sources:

• strip out multi-byte white space from a string PHP
• What are all the Japanese whitespace characters?

(I don't have enough reputation to post a comment, so I'm wrote this as an answer.)

Answer 8

Assuming $string = "\tA\t B \tC \t D "; (a mix of tabs and spaces including leading tab and trailing space)

Obviously splitting on just spaces or just tabs will not work. Don't use these:

preg_split('~ +~', $string) // one or more literal spaces, allow empty elements
preg_split('~ +~', $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY) // one or more literal spaces, deny empty elements

preg_split('~\t+~', $string) // one or more tabs, allow empty elements
preg_split('~\t+~', $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY) // one or more tabs, deny empty elements

Use these:

preg_split('~\s+~', $string) // one or more whitespace character, allow empty elements
preg_split('~\s+~', $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY), // one or more whitespace character, deny empty elements

preg_split('~[\t ]+~', $string) // one or more tabs or spaces, allow empty elements
preg_split('~[\t ]+~', $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY)  // one or more tabs or spaces, deny empty elements

preg_split('~\h+~', $string) // one or more horizontal whitespaces, allow empty elements
preg_split('~\h+~', $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY) // one or more horizontal whitespaces, deny empty elements

A demonstration of all techniques below can be found here.

Reference Horizontal Whitespace

Answer 9

For anyone who needs to quickly grab just one word from the string:

$name = "John Doe";
preg_split('/\s+/', $name)[0];
// John

Note the [0] which will only grab the first word - modify as necessary for whichever element in the array you need.

Or for an even more performant but less robust solution to do the same thing:

$name = "John Doe";
strtok($string, " ")[0];
// John