[thelist] converting whitespace to single space between printablecharacters

[Chris at globet.com]

Alex

> Im trying to reduce the whitespace between printable 
> characters to a single space.
> 
> What i want to do is get all of the the words in a text so as 
> to make a histogram of word frequencies.
> 
> Im doing this by exploding the string and using space as the 
> delimiter. 

Caveat: I'm not a PHP programmer. Having said this, would it be easier
to use regular expressions to create a collection of words thus:

preg_match("/^\w/i", $text, $matches);

After which you could analyse the words in the collection.

> that only works in so far as words that are separated by 
> spaces. so i find that i get words that have been yoked 
> together since they were seperated with a return character.
> 
> how would i convert the text to be ready before i use 'explode'?

If you must use this method, can you use regular expressions, replacing
strings conforming to the following pattern with a single space:

/[\n\r\\s\t]+/

To be on the safe side you could then replace strings conforming to the
following pattern with a single space:

/\s+/

HTH

Chris Marsh
Web Developer
http://www.globet.com/
Tel: +44 20 8246 4804 Ext 828
Fax: +44 20 8246 4808

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