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?

Accepted Answer

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));
```

Separate space-delimited words in a string

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