[thelist] Regex Help
Noah St. Amand
noah at tookish.net
Sat Feb 4 00:14:41 CST 2006
Hi,
I'm trying to write a regex to extract the first sentence from a string
that can be any length, from a few words to multiple paragraphs.
The complicating factors are that the first sentence might include
periods that don't indicate the end of the sentence (e.g., an email
address), the first paragraph may be only one sentence long (in which
case the period I want to target will be followed by a line break rather
than a space), and there may actually be no period anywhere in the
string (in which case I'll just take the whole string). What I have so
far is:
"/^[^\.]*\.\s/"
This works in most cases, but doesn't return anything if the first
sentence contains a period not followed by a \s. I think I can see why
this is, but I can't find a syntax to make it work.
I'm using preg_match in PHP if that's at all relevant.
Thanks for any advice,
Noah
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