Spliting sentences into paragraph based on numbers of words count

Question

I want to split a sentence into a paragraph and each paragraph should have less than numbers of words. For example:

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. 

Paragraph 1: 
Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old.

Paragraph 2: 
Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. 

In the above example, words less than 20 is in a paragraph 1 and rest are on Paragraph 2.

Is there any way to achieve this using php ?

I have tried $abc = explode(' ', $str, 20); which will store 20 words in a array then the rest of them to last array $abc['21']. How could I extract data from first 20 array as the first paragraph then the rest as the second paragraph ?

Answer 1

First split string into sentences. Then loop over sentences array, start by adding the sentence to a paragraphs array, then count the words in that element of the paragraphs array, if greater than 19 increment paragraph counter.

$string = 'Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source.';

$sentences = preg_split('/(?<=[.?!;])\s+(?=\p{Lu})/', $string);

$ii = 0;
$paragraphs = array();
foreach ( $sentences as $value ) {
    if ( isset($paragraphs[$ii]) ) { $paragraphs[$ii] .= $value; }
    else { $paragraphs[$ii] = $value; }
    if ( 19 < str_word_count($paragraphs[$ii]) ) {
        $ii++;
    }
}
print_r($paragraphs);

Output:

Array
(
    [0] => Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text.It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old.
    [1] => Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source.
)

Sentence splitter found here: Splitting paragraphs into sentences with regexp and PHP