On Wed, 2006-08-09 at 08:11 -0700, Kevin Murphy wrote: > > On Aug 8, 2006, at 11:30 PM, Dave M G wrote: > > > PHP List, > > > > This regular expression stuff is way tricky. > > > > Thanks to help from this list, I have an expression that will > > select the first word of a string, up to the first white space: > > "#^(.*)\s#iU" > > > > But after some consideration, I realized that I wanted to keep both > > parts of the original text. The first word, and then everything > > that came after it, should be divided and stored in separate > > variables. > > Now, I would do this different. Probably "wrong" but instead of a > regular expression here, I would do something like this: > > $array = explode(" ",$string); > $first_word = $array[0]; > $rest_words = substr_replace($string,"",0,strlen($first_word)); This presumes a space and not just whitespace. What does the adaptation look like if you account for space, tab, newline, carriage return? >:) That said, if we were to only match on a space character: <?php $text = "The nimble fox jumped over the river."; if( ($splitPoint = strpos( $text, ' ' )) !== false ) { $word = substr( $text, 0, $splitPoint ); $rest = substr( $text, $splitPoint + 1 ); } else { $word = $text; $rest = ''; } echo "[$word] [$rest]\n"; ?> But then yours is more concise (though not as concise as the regular expression). This is just faster. Depends on what you want ;) Cheers, Rob. -- .------------------------------------------------------------. | InterJinn Application Framework - http://www.interjinn.com | :------------------------------------------------------------: | An application and templating framework for PHP. Boasting | | a powerful, scalable system for accessing system services | | such as forms, properties, sessions, and caches. InterJinn | | also provides an extremely flexible architecture for | | creating re-usable components quickly and easily. | `------------------------------------------------------------' -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php