Spacing out CamelCase in PHP

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27 May 2009 | Sections: Computing

Here’s a nifty function to put spaces in your CamelCased words:

function spacify($camel, $glue = ' ') {
    return $camel[0] . substr(implode($glue, array_map('implode', array_chunk(preg_split('/([A-Z])/',
        ucfirst($camel), -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY | PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE), 2))), 1);
}

echo spacify('CamelCaseWords'); // 'Camel Case Words'

I added in the $glue parameter to be even more nifty, but a bit of thinking made it clear that it wouldn’t work when the first letter was lower-case. Should be fine now!