Getting first two words from string in php [closed]

Question

I have string like:

$message="AB 1234 Hello, how are you?

I want to get like this:

$message[0] = AB
$message[1] = 1234
$message[2] = Hello, how are you?

Please don't suggest substr function because length of first two words may vary but they will have spaces in between. Any other suggestion?

Answer 1

you can use the following function.

// Example 1
$pizza  = "piece1 piece2 piece3 piece4 piece5 piece6";
$pieces = explode(" ", $pizza);
echo $pieces[0]; // piece1
echo $pieces[1]; // piece2

output:
//piece1
//piece2

More information: http://php.net/manual/en/function.explode.php

Answer 2

Use explode() with a limit, eg

$message = explode(' ', $message, 3);

If you need more flexibility around the word delimiter, you can do something similar with preg_split()

$message = preg_split('/[\s,]+/', $message, 3)

Demo - http://codepad.org/1gLJEFIa

Answer 3

If words are simply the first two chunks delimited by sequential whitespace, you could do...

$words = preg_split("/\s+/", $str);

If you want the first two, you could use preg_split()'s limit argument (thanks Phil).