<div>
In what way does it not work?<br />
&lt;?php<br />
if (preg_match(&quot;/^(.*?([.!?]|<wbr /> - )+)/&quot;, &quot;I want to broaden this to include a dash surrounded by spaces such as &nbsp;- &nbsp;, what say you?&quot;, $matches)) {<br />
&nbsp; echo &quot;Match was found &lt;br /&gt;&quot;;<br />
&nbsp; echo $matches[0];<br />
}<br />
?&gt;
</div>


In what way does it not work?
<?php
if (preg_match("/^(.*?([.!?]| - )+)/", "I want to broaden this to include a dash surrounded by spaces such as  -  , what say you?", $matches)) {
  echo "Match was found <br />";
  echo $matches[0];
}
?>

<div>
Thanks for your help.<br />
<br />
I wanted to capture the match and your regex didn't seem to capture anything. Sorry, im no good at regex.
</div>


Thanks for your help.

I wanted to capture the match and your regex didn't seem to capture anything. Sorry, im no good at regex.

<div>
How did you attempt to capture the match?
</div>


How did you attempt to capture the match?

<div>
Thanks again, here's my entire function:<br />
<br />

<pre><code id="code-20-40716258-1">function limit_sentence($text, $limit)
{
    preg_match('/^([^.!?]*[\.!?]+){0,'.$limit.'}/', $text, $abstract);
    return $abstract[0];
}</code></pre>
</div>


Thanks again, here's my entire function:



function limit_sentence($text, $limit)
{
    preg_match('/^([^.!?]*[\.!?]+){0,'.$limit.'}/', $text, $abstract);
    return $abstract[0];
}

<div>
<div class="content wysiwyg-content">
Hello, I am using this REGEX to capture the first group of characters before a period, questionmark or exclamation point. I want to broaden this to include a dash surrounded by spaces such as &quot;&nbsp;- &quot;&nbsp;, what say you?<br />
<br />
Here's what I have:<br />

<pre><code id="code-10-28652569-1">/^([^.!?]*[\.!?]+){0,1}/</code></pre>
<br />
<br />
Thank you!
</div>
</div>


Hello, I am using this REGEX to capture the first group of characters before a period, questionmark or exclamation point. I want to broaden this to include a dash surrounded by spaces such as " - " , what say you?

Here's what I have:
(CODE)


Thank you!

REGEX Help - should be easy for you!

A regular expression ("regex") is a sequence of characters that define a search pattern, mainly for use in pattern matching with strings, or string matching, i.e. "find and replace"-like operations. Regular expression processors are found in several search engines, search and replace dialogs of several word processors and text editors, and in the command lines of text processing utilities, such as sed and AWK. Many programming languages provide regular expression capabilities, some built-in, for example Perl, JavaScript, Ruby, AWK, and Tcl, and others via a standard library, for example .NET languages, Java, Python and C++ (since C++11). Most other languages offer regular expressions via a library.

Regular Expressions

PHP is a widely-used server-side scripting language especially suited for web development, powering tens of millions of sites from Facebook to personal WordPress blogs. PHP is often paired with the MySQL relational database, but includes support for most other mainstream databases. By utilizing different Server APIs, PHP can work on many different web servers as a server-side scripting language.