Get last 3 words from the string?

Question

How do you get last 3 words from the string?

I managed to get working doing like this:

$statusMessage = explode(" ", str_replace(' '," ",$retStatus->plaintext));
$SliceDate = array_slice($statusMessage, -3, 3);
$date = implode(" ", $SliceDate);
echo $date;

Is there a shorter way? Maybe there is a PHP function that I did not know..

Answer 1

explode() is good, but once you've done that you can use

$size = sizeof($statusMessage);

and last 3 are

$statusmessage[$size-1]; 
$statusmessage[$size-2]; 
$statusmessage[$size-3]; 

Answer 2

preg_match('#(?:\s\w+){3}$#', $statusMessage );

Answer 3

preg_match("/(?:\w+\s*){1,3}$/", $input_line, $output_array);

this catches 1 to 3 words and if the row is only 3 long, other regex one was close