PHP Programming

By James N Hitz

The preg_split() function

I like using this function very much. Using this function, you can automatically create an array by splitting a string of text at pre-defined locations indicated using given delimeters. Th syntax for using preg_split() is:

$createdArray = preg_split("delimeter","OriginalString");

An example should be in order. Let's say we have the following employee record:

$employee = JB121|John|Brown|Information Technology|12-Dec-1992;

This (supposedly) is an extract from a database showing the fields: Employee_ID |First_Name |Last_Name |Department |Date_Hired.

To convert this into an array can be helpful at times. To do so we use preg_split as follows:

$emp = preg_split("/\|/", $employee);

Notice here that the pipe symbol (|) is escaped (\|).

OK. So that's it. For starters regular expressions can be very intimidating but with time - as you your PHP-ing skills evolve - you will realize that regular expressions are actually a straight-forward affair. Finito. But before winding up this lesson, let's make a super-example to encompass most of what we have learnt in this and the preceeding lesson.

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