Question

I need to split a string into chunks of 2,2,3,3 characters and was able to do so in Perl by using unpack:

unpack("A2A2A3A3", 'thisisloremipsum');

However the same function does not work in PHP, it gives this output:

Array
(
    [A2A3A3] => th
)

How can I do this by using unpack? I don’t want to write a function for it, it should be possible with unpack but how?

Thanks in advance,

Answer 1

Quoting the manual page of unpack :

unpack() works slightly different
from Perl as the unpacked data is
stored in an associative array.

To accomplish this you have to
name the different format codes and separate them by a slash /.

Which means that, using something like this :

$a = unpack("A2first/A2second/A3third/A3fourth", 'thisisloremipsum');
var_dump($a);

You’ll get the following output :

array
  'first' => string 'th' (length=2)
  'second' => string 'is' (length=2)
  'third' => string 'isl' (length=3)
  'fourth' => string 'ore' (length=3)