PHP explode the string, but treat words in quotes as a single word

Solution 1:

You could use a preg_match_all(...):

$text = 'Lorem ipsum "dolor sit amet" consectetur "adipiscing \\"elit" dolor';
preg_match_all('/"(?:\\\\.|[^\\\\"])*"|\S+/', $text, $matches);
print_r($matches);

which will produce:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => Lorem
            [1] => ipsum
            [2] => "dolor sit amet"
            [3] => consectetur
            [4] => "adipiscing \"elit"
            [5] => dolor
        )

)

And as you can see, it also accounts for escaped quotes inside quoted strings.

EDIT

A short explanation:

"           # match the character '"'
(?:         # start non-capture group 1 
  \\        #   match the character '\'
  .         #   match any character except line breaks
  |         #   OR
  [^\\"]    #   match any character except '\' and '"'
)*          # end non-capture group 1 and repeat it zero or more times
"           # match the character '"'
|           # OR
\S+         # match a non-whitespace character: [^\s] and repeat it one or more times

And in case of matching %22 instead of double quotes, you'd do:

preg_match_all('/%22(?:\\\\.|(?!%22).)*%22|\S+/', $text, $matches);

Solution 2:

This would have been much easier with str_getcsv().

$test = 'Lorem ipsum "dolor sit amet" consectetur "adipiscing elit" dolor';
var_dump(str_getcsv($test, ' '));

Gives you

array(6) {
  [0]=>
  string(5) "Lorem"
  [1]=>
  string(5) "ipsum"
  [2]=>
  string(14) "dolor sit amet"
  [3]=>
  string(11) "consectetur"
  [4]=>
  string(15) "adipiscing elit"
  [5]=>
  string(5) "dolor"
}

Solution 3:

You can also try this multiple explode function

function multiexplode ($delimiters,$string)
{

$ready = str_replace($delimiters, $delimiters[0], $string);
$launch = explode($delimiters[0], $ready);
return  $launch;
}

$text = "here is a sample: this text, and this will be exploded. this also | this one too :)";
$exploded = multiexplode(array(",",".","|",":"),$text);

print_r($exploded);