PHP - String Explode
The PHP function explode lets
you take a string and blow it up
into smaller pieces. For example,
if you had a sentence you could
ask explode to use the sentence's
spaces " " as dynamite and it
would blow up the sentence into
separate words, which would be
stored in an array. The sentence
"Hello, I would like to lose
weight." would look like this
after explode got done with it:
- Hello,
- I
- would
- like
- to
- lose
- weight.
The dynamite (the space character)
disappears, but the other stuff
remains, but in pieces. With that
abstract picture of the explode
function in mind, lets take a look
at how it really works.
The explode Function
The first argument that explode
takes is the delimiter (our
dynamite) which is used to blow up
the second argument, the original
string. explode returns an array
of string pieces from the original
and they are numbered in order,
starting from 0. Lets take a phone
number in the form ###-###-####
and use a hyphen "-" as our
dynamite to split the string into
three separate chunks
PHP Code:
|
$rawPhoneNumber =
"800-555-5555";
$phoneChunks = explode("-", $rawPhoneNumber);
echo "Raw Phone Number = $rawPhoneNumber
<br />";
echo "First chunk =
$phoneChunks[0]<br />";
echo "Second chunk =
$phoneChunks[1]<br />";
echo "Third Chunk chunk =
$phoneChunks[2]"; |
Display:
Raw Phone Number =
800-555-5555
First chunk = 800
Second chunk = 555
Third Chunk chunk = 5555 |
explode Function - Setting a Limit
If you want to control the
amount of destruction that explode
can wreak on your original string,
consider using the third
(optional) argument which allows
you to set the number of pieces
explode can return. This means it
will stop exploding once the
number of pieces equals the set
limit. Below we've blown up a
sentence with no limit and then
with a limit of 4.
PHP Code:
|
$someWords = "Please don't
blow me to pieces.";
$wordChunks = explode(" ", $someWords);
for($i = 0; $i <
count($wordChunks); $i++){
echo "Piece $i = $wordChunks[$i]
<br />";
}
$wordChunksLimited = explode("
", $someWords, 4);
for($i = 0; $i <
count($wordChunksLimited); $i++){
echo "Limited Piece $i = $wordChunksLimited[$i]
<br />";
}
|
Display:
Piece 0 = Please
Piece 1 = don't
Piece 2 = blow
Piece 3 = me
Piece 4 = to
Piece 5 = pieces.
Limited Piece 0 = Please
Limited Piece 1 = don't
Limited Piece 2 = blow
Limited Piece 3 = me to
pieces. |
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