Question

I have a string of data which is an unknown length eg $myvar = "data,data"; and i want to explode the string eg list($a, $b) = explode(",", $myvar) which works great if I know the length of the data, but im not sure how to handle variable lengths.

i was thinking of using if statments.

eg: $letter_count = substr_count($myvar, ',');

if($letter_count == 2) { list($a, $b) = explode(",", $myvar) }
elseif($letter_count == 3) { list($a, $b, $c) = explode(",", $myvar) } 

but this is not practical, anyone got any ideas how else i could do this?

Answer 1

If you use explode, it will return an array that is split by your delimiter. You would then call each item by its index position. The following example uses a space as the delimiter.

$pizza  = "piece1 piece2 piece3 piece4 piece5 piece6";
$pieces = explode(" ", $pizza);
echo $pieces[0]; // piece1
echo $pieces[1]; // piece2