How Can I Split a String into Words While Keeping Quoted Phrases Intact?

Splitting Strings while Preserving Quoted Phrases

The task is to explode a given string into an array of words, with the unique requirement that quoted phrases are treated as single units.

To achieve this, one approach involves utilizing regular expression matching. A suitable pattern to capture both quoted phrases and individual words is:

"(?:\.|[^\"])*"|\S+

This pattern consists of two parts separated by an alternation operator (|):

1. "(?:\.|[^\"])*": This matches a string enclosed in double quotes ("). It also accounts for escaped quotes () within the quoted text using non-capturing group 1.
2. S : This matches one or more non-whitespace characters, which represents individual words.

To use this pattern in PHP, one can employ preg_match_all(...):

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

This will populate the $matches array with an array of all captured matches, where quoted phrases will be isolated as single elements.

For example, with the provided input string:

Lorem ipsum "dolor sit amet" consectetur "adipiscing \"elit" dolor

The output of preg_match_all(...) will be:

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

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