In this PHP tutorial, you shall learn how to loop through words in a given string using explode() function and For loop, with example programs.
PHP – Iterate over words in String
To loop through words in a string in PHP, use explode() function with space as delimiter. The explode() functions returns an array containing words and you can then use a looping statement to traverse through the words one by one.
Step by step process
The following is a step by step process to split string into words.
- Take a string with words.
- Define the delimiter. Usually, space would be delimiter between words in a string.
- Call explode() function, with the delimiter and string passed as arguments.
- explode() returns an array containing words. Save it to a variable.
- Use foreach statement to loop through each item in the array.
Example
In this example, we will take a string containing words, explode it with a specific delimiter, collect the words into a variable, and print them in a foreach statement.
PHP Program
<?php $str = "Apple is healthy."; $delimiter = ' '; $words = explode($delimiter, $str); foreach ($words as $word) { echo $word; echo "<br>"; } ?>
Program Output

As an improvisation, you can clean the words from punctuation marks. Also, you may convert the string to a lower case, so that the words would be uniform with respect to case.
Conclusion
In this PHP Tutorial, we learned how to loop through words in a string, using explode() function and foreach statement.