Locating Words at Arbitrary Positions
Explore techniques for finding words at any position within a string using Laravel and PHP helper functions. Understand handling spaces, punctuation, and special cases like hyphenated words for precise text parsing.
We are going to continue our discussion surrounding lines and words. Since so much of our work and lives revolve around information presented using these two constructs, it makes sense for us to linger on them for a little longer. We created several helper methods that enable us to perform various word and line-related tasks, such as:
- Resolving the line and column numbers of arbitrary positions
- Counting word occurrences
- Splitting strings into words
We will dive right in and work on a collection of new word-related helper methods aimed at helping retrieve information about words located at arbitrary positions within a string.
Consider the simple phrase “Hello, world.” Let’s say that we need to get the word located at position 9, which corresponds to the letter “r” within the word “world.” This position was chosen because it presents an exciting challenge right from the start: we have multiple choices ...