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