Separate space-delimited words in a string

Question

I have a text string in the following format

$str= "word1 word2 word3 word4 ";

So I want to separate each word from the string. Two words are separated by a blank space How do I do that? Is there any built-in function to do that?

Answer 1

The easiest would be to use explode:

$words = explode(' ', $str);

But that does only accept fixed separators. split an preg_split do accept regular expressions so that your words can be separated by multiple spaces:

$words = split('\s+', $str);
// or
$words = preg_split('/\s+/', $str);

Now you can additionally remove leading and trailing spaces with trim:

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

Answer 2

$words = explode( ' ', $str );

See: http://www.php.net/explode