(PHP 4, PHP 5)
preg_split — Split string by a regular expression
Split the given string by a regular expression.
The pattern to search for, as a string.
The input string.
If specified, then only substrings up to limit are returned with the rest of the string being placed in the last substring. A limit of -1, 0 or null means "no limit" and, as is standard across PHP, you can use null to skip to the flags parameter.
flags can be any combination of the following flags (combined with the | bitwise operator):
If this flag is set, for every occurring match the appendant string offset will also be returned. Note that this changes the return value in an array where every element is an array consisting of the matched string at offset 0 and its string offset into subject at offset 1.
Returns an array containing substrings of subject split along boundaries matched by pattern.
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
| 4.3.0 | The PREG_SPLIT_OFFSET_CAPTURE was added |
| 4.0.5 | The PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE was added |
Example #1 preg_split() example : Get the parts of a search string
<?php
// split the phrase by any number of commas or space characters,
// which include " ", \r, \t, \n and \f
$keywords = preg_split("/[\s,]+/", "hypertext language, programming");
?>
Example #2 Splitting a string into component characters
<?php
$str = 'string';
$chars = preg_split('//', $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
print_r($chars);
?>
Example #3 Splitting a string into matches and their offsets
<?php
$str = 'hypertext language programming';
$chars = preg_split('/ /', $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
print_r($chars);
?>
The above example will output:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[0] => hypertext
[1] => 0
)
[1] => Array
(
[0] => language
[1] => 10
)
[2] => Array
(
[0] => programming
[1] => 19
)
)
If you don't need the power of regular expressions, you can choose faster (albeit simpler) alternatives like explode() or str_split().