Splitting a string by separators

explode and strstr are simpler methods to get substrings by separators.

A string containing several parts of text that are separated by a common character can be split into parts with the explode function.

$fruits = "apple,pear,grapefruit,cherry";
print_r(explode(",",$fruits)); // ['apple', 'pear', 'grapefruit', 'cherry']

The method also supports a limit parameter that can be used as follow:

$fruits= 'apple,pear,grapefruit,cherry';

If the limit parameter is zero, then this is treated as 1.

print_r(explode(',',$fruits,0)); // ['apple,pear,grapefruit,cherry']

If limit is set and positive, the returned array will contain a maximum of limit elements with the last element containing the rest of string.

print_r(explode(',',$fruits,2)); // ['apple', 'pear,grapefruit,cherry']

If the limit parameter is negative, all components except the last -limit are returned.

print_r(explode(',',$fruits,-1)); // ['apple', 'pear', 'grapefruit']

explode can be combined with list to parse a string into variables in one line:

$email = "user@example.com";
list($name, $domain) = explode("@", $email);

However, make sure that the result of explode contains enough elements, or an undefined index warning would be triggered.

strstr strips away or only returns the substring before the first occurrence of the given needle.

$string = "1:23:456";
echo json_encode(explode(":", $string)); // ["1","23","456"]
var_dump(strstr($string, ":")); // string(7) ":23:456"

var_dump(strstr($string, ":", true)); // string(1) "1"

Found a mistake? Have a question or improvement idea? Let me know.

String parsing:

* String Parsing

* Splitting a string by separators

* Searching a substring with strpos

* Substring

* Parsing string using regular expressions

* Extractingreplacing substrings

Table Of Contents

0 Getting started

1 Variables

2 Arrays

3 Functional programming

4 Types

5 Autoloading primer

6 Exception handling and error reporting

7 Working with dates and time

8 Sending email

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10 Cookies

11 Classes and objects

12 Password hashing

13 Output buffering

14 JSON

15 SOAP

16 Reflection

17 cURL

18 Dependency injection

19 XML

20 Regular expressions

21 Traits

22 Namespaces

23 Parsing HTML

24 Composer dependency manager

25 Magic methods

26 Alternative syntax for control structures

27 File handling

28 Magic constants

29 Type hinting

30 Multi-threading extension

31 Filters, filter functions

32 Generators

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34 Constants

35 UTF-8

36 URLs

37 Object serialization

38 PHPDoc

39 Contributing to PHP Manual

40 String parsing

41 Loops

42 Control structures

43 Serialization

44 Closur

45 Reading request data

46 Type juggling and non-strict comparison issues

47 Security

48 PHP MySQLi

49 Command Line Interface CLI

50 Localization

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52 Superglobal variables

53 Unit testing

54 Variable scope

55 References

56 Compilation errors and warning

57 Installing PHP on Windows

58 DateTime class

59 Headers manipulation

60 Performance

61 Common Errors

62 Installing on Linux / Unix

63 Contributing to PHP Core

64 Coding conventions

65 Using MongoDB

66 Asynchronous programming

67 Using SQLSRV

68 Unicode Support

69 Functions

70 Create PDF files

71 Hot to detect client IP address

72 YAML

73 Image processing with GD

74 Multiprocessing

75 SOAP Server

76 Machine learning

77 Cache

78 Streams

79 Array iteration

80 Cryptography

81 PDO

82 SQLite3

83 Sockets

84 Outputting the value of a variable

85 String formatting

86 Compile PHP extensions

87 MongoDB

88 Manipulating an array

89 Executing upon an array

90 Processing multiple arrays together

91 SPL data structures

92 Comments

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96 SimplXML

97 HTTP Authentication

98 Recipies

99 BC Math Binary Calculator

100 Docker deployment

101 WebSockets

102 APCu

103 Design patterns

104 Secure remember me

105 PHP mysqli

106 PHP built-in server

107 How to break down an URL

108 PSR

109 Contributors