I want to extract proper nouns (e.g Micheal Jackson) from a text with PHP regex but my regex is not right.
The text:
My friend Micheal Jackson was the King of Pop. The Game Album sold little.
What I want:
A regex that is able to extract proper nouns of multiple words e.g Micheal Jackson or The Game Album.
My regex:
/(?<=\s)([A-Z][a-z]+).*(?=\s)/
Thanks.
P.S. Posted via a mobile device. Apologies if format is poor.
Try to use word boundaries instead of your lookbehind/lookahead
/\b([A-Z][a-z]+)\b/
I don't understand your .* part this will match anything after the first word till the last whitespace, so I removed it from my regex.
If you want to match multiple words at once (Maybe you wanted to achieve this with your .*?) try this:
(?:\s*\b([A-Z][a-z]+)\b)+
See it here on Regexr
(?:\s*\b([A-Z][a-z]+)\b)+ regex. What about proper nouns that have capitals in the middle of a single word (for example, a company name like 'CompuServe')? Maybe you should consider using (?:\s*\b([A-Z][A-Za-z]+)\b)+ instead.
The Stanford Parser can help you here. It will tokenize your phrase and extract proper nouns and all other pieces according to the sentence structure.
It's available as a jar download or you can try it out online here: http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/
