I want to return matches for every instance of a three word phrase. I'm not worried about proper grammar right now. I'm more interested in how to achieve the 'multi-pass' nature of the request.
$string = "one two three four five";
$regex = '/(?:[^\\s\\.]+\\s){3}/ui';
preg_match_all($regex, $string, $matches);
Will only return:
one two three
Needed results:
one two three
two three four
three four five
You can do it putting your pattern in a lookahead:
$string = "one two three four five";
$regex = '~\b(?=([^\s.]+(?:\s[^\s.]+){2}))~u';
preg_match_all($regex, $string, $matches);
print_r($matches[1]);
^\s (anything but space). How would you solve for that?\b with (?<![^\s.]) (not preceded by a character that is not a white-space or a dot)It would be easier to use explode().
$string = "one two three four five";
$arr = explode(" ", $string);
for ($i = 0; $i < 3; $i++)
echo $arr[$i], " ", $arr[$i + 1], " ", $arr[$i + 2], "\n";
Outputs:
one two three
two three four
three four five
