Select only sentences in javascript

Question

I have been trying to employ a regular expression to grab sentences from the following paragraph:

str="Hello, my name is Mr. Bob.  How are you? I am in the F.B.I. My favorite number is 2.5."   

var res = str.match( /[^\.!\?]+[\.!\?]+/g ); 

console.log(res);

Here is the result:

["Hello, my name is Lance.", "  How are you?", " I am in the F.", "B.", "I.", " My favorite number is 2.", "5."]

How can I capture "F.B.I." and "2.5" as words in a sentence and not a bunch of individual sentences?

can you please "define" sentence in a clear English sentence — Gavriel, Feb 06 '16 at 19:30
Take a look at [this](http://stackoverflow.com/a/35109078/3764814) - it's not easy in the general case. — Lucas Trzesniewski, Feb 06 '16 at 19:32
I didn't get the Mr. That's hard. The rest: `var res = str.match( /[A-Z].*?[\.\!\?]( |$)/g);` — Sigfried, Feb 06 '16 at 19:41
Generally, it's not a trivial task. Check out [this](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34881790/split-string-into-sentences-using-regex) answer. — ndnenkov, Feb 06 '16 at 20:45
The example you all have shared is insightful in terms of informing me of the scale of work one must go through to solve this problem. However, your linked solution is in php and I have no familiarity with php unfortunately. Is php to javascript conversion difficult? Especially when dealing with such a complex issue? Thanks! — Lance, Feb 07 '16 at 13:32

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:45

A space symbol or the end of the string might be a good hint that it's the end of the sentence.

str="Hello, my name is Mr. Bob.  How are you? I am in the F.B.I. My favorite number is 2.5."   
console.log(str.match( /.*?[\.!\?]+(?:\s|$)/g ));

Which outputs:

["Hello, my name is Mr. ", "Bob. ", " How are you? ", "I am in the F.B.I. ", "My favorite number is 2.5."]

Bob can't be captured except explicitly specifying some words that are usually followed by a dot (like Mr, Ms, Mrs, etc) and, as mentioned by @ndn in comments, a more detailed research can be found here

Select only sentences in javascript

1 Answers1