Question

If I have a textbox where a user can enter multiple emails, i.e.

[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

How can I use PHP to separate each email into an array/object?

Is it possible to give the users the option to separate by ‘;’ or ‘,’ or a new line?

Answer 1

If you give the user a delimiter character, you can use explode. For instance, using ;:

$emails = explode(';', $_GET['emails']);

You could use , or \n (new line) instead of ; if you preferred.

If you wanted to divide the string based on all these characters, use preg_split:

$emails = preg_split('/[;,\n]/', $_GET['emails']);

Example:

<?php

$emails = '[e-mail];[e-mail]
[e-mail],[e-mail]';

$emails = preg_split('/[,;\n]/', $emails);

print_r($emails);
/*
Array
(
    [0] => [e-mail]
    [1] => [e-mail]
    [2] => [e-mail]
    [3] => [e-mail]
)
*/