explode() on Japanese string

Question

I have to use the explode() function on Japanese text but it doesn\'t work.

Here is an example of what I have

$string = \'私　は　イタリア　人　です\';
$string = expl         


        

Answer 1

That is for the simple reason that you do not have a space character here. You have an "IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE" character with the hex code "e3 80 80".

If you use that as your delimiter, it will work.

Answer 2

There are a number of characters other than simple ASCII space that can add whitespace between characters.

You could try using preg_split using \s (whitespace characters) or \b (word boundaries) as the pattern, however this may not be ideal as Japanese is almost certainly going to be encoded in a multiple-byte format.

Answer 3

You're using the wrong space. The text uses full-width spaces (U+3000 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE) and you're supplying a half-width space (U+0020 SPACE).

Answer 4

There're two issues here.

First of all, you don't say what your encoding is but I suppose all Japanese encodings are multi-byte. On the other side, the explode() function (like all regular PHP functions) expects single-byte input. There's no exact multi-byte equivalent but mb_split() could do the trick.

Secondly, you are exploding by regular space (U+0020) but your string contains another character (U+3000).

To sum up (and assuming you are using UTF-8):

<?php

mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
mb_regex_encoding('UTF-8');

$string = '私　は　イタリア　人　です';
print_r(mb_split('　', $string));

... or even better:

<?php

mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
mb_regex_encoding('UTF-8');

$string = '私　は　イタリア　人　です';
print_r(mb_split('[[:space:]]', $string));

Answer 5

convert your string first using iconv() and then use it on explode. Convert to utf8

$string = explode(" ", iconv('', 'utf-8', $string));