JavaScript break sentence by words

Question

What's a good strategy to get full words into an array with its succeeding character.

Example.

This is an amazing sentence.

Array(
[0] => This 
[1] => is
[2] => an
[3] => amazing
[4] => sentence.
)

Elements 0 - 3 would have a succeeding space, as a period succeeds the 4th element.

I need you to split these by spacing character, Then once width of element with injected array elements reaches X, Break into a new line.

Please, gawd don't give tons of code. I prefer to write my own just tell me how you would do it.

I'd take the approach provided in this answer http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4514144/js-string-split-without-removing-the-delimiters. But for your case change the `var newstringreplaced = string.replace(/d/gi, ",d");` to `var newstringreplaced = string.replace(/\s/gi, " ,");`. **Edit:** Should be advised this approach is only useful if your original string doesn't have a `,`. I suppose this solution is much safer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/4514241/1417588 — Suvi Vignarajah, Aug 27 '13 at 19:12
Use the javascript [split](http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_split.asp) function. — saurabh, Aug 27 '13 at 19:00

Isaac · Answer 1 · 2017-07-21T07:14:59.050

66

Similar to Ravi's answer, use match, but use the word boundary \b in the regex to split on word boundaries:

'This is  a test.  This is only a test.'.match(/\b(\w+)\b/g)

yields

["This", "is", "a", "test", "This", "is", "only", "a", "test"]

or

'This is  a test.  This is only a test.'.match(/\b(\w+\W+)/g)

yields

["This ", "is  ", "a ", "test.  ", "This ", "is ", "only ", "a ", "test."]

edited Jul 21 '17 at 07:14

answered Apr 08 '16 at 19:58

Isaac

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7

This is indeed the best answer, as split by space is not really usable for real-life scenarios. Well, unless you don't use punctuation and always use single whitespace. – Alex.Me Sep 27 '17 at 09:37
5

That converts "won't" into "won" and "t". This allows contractions: str.match(/\b(\w+)'?(\w+)?\b/g) – Thomas David Kehoe Feb 17 '18 at 23:03
english words only :( – iiic Jun 17 '20 at 12:36

score 62 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 27 '13 at 18:55

62

Just use split:

var str = "This is an amazing sentence.";
var words = str.split(" ");
console.log(words);
//["This", "is", "an", "amazing", "sentence."]

and if you need it with a space, why don't you just do that? (use a loop afterwards)

var str = "This is an amazing sentence.";
var words = str.split(" ");
for (var i = 0; i < words.length - 1; i++) {
    words[i] += " ";
}
console.log(words);
//["This ", "is ", "an ", "amazing ", "sentence."]

Oh, and sleep well!

answered Aug 27 '13 at 18:55

h2ooooooo

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@cars10 Changed the answer - does this fix it? – h2ooooooo Aug 27 '13 at 18:58
3

@cars10 why would you need the blanks at the end of each word? If you want them back when you concat your string just `.join(' ');` – Dennis Martinez Aug 27 '13 at 18:59
I was just typing this up. Good, quick response. – EnigmaRM Aug 27 '13 at 18:59
Good answer :) i need the spaces because the users sentence has spaces and i plan to re output their sentence without having to declare a space in the loop. :) THANK U – THE AMAZING Aug 27 '13 at 19:05
2

@user2716649 As Dennis Martinez mentioned, you can simply use [`words.join(" ")`](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/join) to get `This is an amazing sentence.` again. – h2ooooooo Aug 27 '13 at 19:06
how about multiple spaces between words!? ... it will put empty string elements inside array ... "asd asd asd 00 0".split(' ').filter(Boolean) solves that – user2846569 Mar 08 '18 at 12:02
@user2846569 You can just use regex - `string.split(/\s+/g)` – h2ooooooo Mar 08 '18 at 14:35
@h2ooooooo nope ... check " a b b ".split(/\s+/g) ... ["", "a", "b", "b", ""] – user2846569 Mar 08 '18 at 15:18
@user2846569 `' a b b '.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, '').split(/\s+/g);` – h2ooooooo Mar 08 '18 at 15:19
and don't forget `map`. If you did need to add spaces to each word, then `map` is your friend. – ctrl-alt-delor Dec 28 '19 at 09:48

score 18 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 27 '13 at 19:04

18

try this

var words = str.replace(/([ .,;]+)/g,'$1§sep§').split('§sep§');

This will

insert a marker §sep§ after every chosen delimiter [ .,;]+
split the string at the marked positions, thereby preserving the actual delimiters.

answered Aug 27 '13 at 19:04

Carsten Massmann

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Ravi Rajendra · Answer 4 · 2018-11-07T20:07:41.683

7

If you need spaces and the dots the easiest would be.

"This is an amazing sentence.".match(/.*?[\.\s]+?/g);

the result would be

['This ','is ','an ','amazing ','sentence.']

edited Nov 07 '18 at 20:07

answered Aug 27 '13 at 19:13

Ravi Rajendra

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score 6 · Answer 5 · answered Nov 12 '20 at 03:07

6

Use split and filter to remove leading and trailing whitespaces.

let str = '     This is an amazing sentence.  ',
  words = str.split(' ').filter(w => w !== '');

console.log(words);

answered Nov 12 '20 at 03:07

Penny Liu

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score 2 · Answer 6 · answered Aug 27 '13 at 19:01

Here is an option if you wanted to include the space and complete in O(N)

var str = "This is an amazing sentence.";
var words = [];
var buf = "";
for(var i = 0; i < str.length; i++) {
    buf += str[i];
    if(str[i] == " ") {
        words.push(buf);
        buf = "";
    }
}

if(buf.length > 0) {
    words.push(buf);
}

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Nov 07 '18 at 05:35

0

This can be done with lodash _.words:

var str = 'This is an amazing sentence.';
console.log(_.words(str, /[^, ]+/g));

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/lodash.js/4.17.11/lodash.min.js"></script>

answered Nov 07 '18 at 05:35

Penny Liu

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score 0 · Answer 8 · answered Apr 08 '21 at 16:28

0

It can be done with split function:

"This is an amazing sentence.".split(' ')

answered Apr 08 '21 at 16:28

Maciej Bledkowski

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JavaScript break sentence by words

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