How to correctly split a string into words in JavaScript

If you have been using .split(' ') to get an array of words from a string, you should stop doing so. It works perfectly for English, but it's not the best solution for other languages.

For example, if you have a string like this:

const str = '俺はルフィ！海賊王になる男だ！'
console.table(str.split(' '))

you will get this:

Image

which is not what we want. That's the whole sentence.

Instead, we should use the Intl.Segmenter!

const str = '俺はルフィ！海賊王になる男だ！'
const segmenterJa = new Intl.Segmenter('ja-JP', { granularity: 'word' })

const segments = segmenterJa.segment(str)
console.table(Array.from(segments))

Image

We can also use { granularity: 'sentence' } to get the sentences in the string.

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