How to Get The First Sentence from a String in PHP
PHP snippet to return the first sentence from a string. Very useful for generating post or page excerpts, extracts or meta descriptions.

By Tim Trott | PHP Tutorials | January 24, 2009

| (1) | (0)

This PHP function will get the first sentence from a string delimited by a full stop. If a string contains and exclamation, this will also act and an end of sentence.

function getFirstSentence($string) {
  $excl = strpos($string,"!");
  $stop = strpos($string,".");
  
  if ($excl === false) $excl = 9999;
  if ($stop === false) $stop = 9999;
  
  if ($excl < $stop) return $excl + 1;
  if ($excl > $stop) return $stop + 1;
}

Example to get first sentence from a string.

$string = "This is a test sentence, which will test the getFirstSentence() function. This is another sentence.";
$firstSentence = getFirstSentence($string);
echo $firstSentence;

The function outputs -

This is a test sentence, which will test the getFirstSentence() function.

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On Friday 4th of November 2011, John Deere said

A better way would be to use regex

function getFirstSentence($string) {
  $sentence = preg_split( &#039;/(\.|!|\?)\s/&#039;, $string, 2, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE );
  return $sentence[&#039;0&#039;] . $sentence[&#039;1&#039;];
}