I have a string in PHP

$string = "Dogs are Jonny's favorite pet";

I want to use regex or some method to remove s or 's from the end of all words in the string.

The desired output would be:

$revisedString = "Dog are Jonny favorite pet";

Here is my current approach:

<?php

$string = "Dogs are Jonny's favorite pet";

$stringWords = explode(" ", $string);
$counter = 0;
foreach($stringWords as $string) {

     if(substr($string, -1) == s){
         $stringWords[$counter] = trim($string, "s");
     }
  
    if(strpos($string, "'s") !== false){
       $stringWords[$counter] = trim($string, "'s");
    }
    
    $counter = $counter   1;
}

print_r($stringWords);

$newString = "";
foreach($stringWords as $string){
   $newString = $newString . $string . " ";
}

echo $newString;
}


?>

How would this be achieved with REGEX?

CodePudding user response：

For general use, you must leverage much more sophisticated technique than an English-ignorant regex pattern. There may be fringe cases where the following pattern fails by removing an s that it shouldn't. It could be a name, an acronym, or something else.

As an unreliable solution, you can optionally match an apostrophe then match a literal s if it is not immediately preceded by another s. Adding a word boundary (\b) on the end improves the accuracy that you are matching the end of words.

Code: (Demo)

$string = "The bass can access the river's delta from the ocean. The fishermen, assassins, and their friends are happy on the banks";

var_export(preg_replace("~'?(?<!s)s\b~", '', $string));

Output:

'The bass can access the river delta from the ocean. The fishermen, assassin, and their friend are happy on the bank'

CodePudding user response：

PHP Live Regex always helped me a lot in such moments. Even already knowing how REGEX works, I still use it just to be sure some times.

To make use of REGEX in your case, you can use preg_replace().

<?php

// Your string.
$string = "Dogs are Jonny's favorite pet";

// The vertical bar means "or" and the backslash
// before the apostrophe is needed so you don't end
// your pattern string since we're using single quotes
// to delimit it. "\s" means a single space.
$regex_pattern = '/\'s\s|s\s|s$/';

// Fill the preg_replace() with the pattern, the replacement
// (a single space in this case), your string, -1 (so preg_replace()
// will replace all the matches) and a variable of your desire
// to be the "counter" (preg_replace() will automatically
// fill it).
$newString = preg_replace($regex_pattern, ' ', $string, -1, $counter);

// Use the rtrim() to remove spaces at the right of the sentence.
$newString = rtrim($newString, " ");

echo "New string: " . $newString . ". ";
echo "Replacements: " . $counter . ".";

?>

In this case, the function will identify any "'s" or "s" with spaces (\s) after them and then replace them with a single space.

The preg_replace() will also count all the replacements and register them automatically on $counter or any variable you place there instead.

Edit:

Phil's comment is right and indeed my previous REGEX would lose a "s" at the end of the string. Adding "|s$" will solve it. Again, "|" means "or" and the "$" means that the "s" must be at the end of the string.

In attention to mickmackusa's comment, my solution is meant only to remove "s" characters at the end of words inside the string as this was Sparky Johnson' request here. Removing plurals would require a complex code since not only we need to remove "s" characters from plural only words but also change verbs and other stuff.