How to Extract a Specific Number of Words from a Text String in PHP?

Extracting Specific Words from a Text String

Question:

How can I limit the number of words returned from a text string? For instance, I only want to obtain the initial 10 words.

Answer:

To retrieve only the first N words from a string, you can employ various methods in PHP. Let's explore a few options:

Implode with Array Slice:

This approach utilizes the implode() and array_slice() functions to achieve the desired outcome:

<code class="php">$sentence = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.";
$words = implode(' ', array_slice(explode(' ', $sentence), 0, 10));
echo $words; // Output: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit"</code>

Preg_match Method:

The preg_match() function provides a more flexible solution, enabling support for other word breaks, such as commas or dashes:

<code class="php">function get_words($sentence, $count = 10) {
  preg_match("/(?:\w+(?:\W+|$)){0,$count}/", $sentence, $matches);
  return $matches[0];
}

$sentence = "Lorem ipsum, dolor sit-amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.";
echo get_words($sentence); // Output: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit-amet"</code>

Handling Unicode and UTF-8:

Note that PHP's default word delimiter patterns do not consider UTF-8 characters. If Unicode and UTF-8 characters are expected in your strings, you can customize the patterns as needed:

<code class="php">$pattern = "/[^\s,\.;\?\!]+([\s,\.;\?\!])?{0,$count}/u";</code>

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