Question

Please help me out on this explode() function issue. I am getting unexpected results for the third scenario, what’s the explanation?

EDIT: The value $page_string is actually from the database. This time I did the tests using var_dump instead of echo. The strings, How does php count them? How is “15&page” count 11?

var_dump($page_string);//string(11) "15&page"

1. Pop out ampersand … fine.

    $page_id_array = explode("&",$page_string);
    $page_id = $page_id_array[0]; 
    var_dump($page_id); 
    // string(2) "15"

2. Pop out number … fine

    $page_id_array = explode("15",$page_string);
    $page_id = $page_id_array[1]; 
    var_dump($page_id); 
    //string(9) "&blog"

3. Pop out ‘&page’ … why?

     $page_id_array = explode("&page",$page_string);
     $page_id = $page_id_array[0]; 
     var_dump($page_id); 
     //string(11) "15&page"
     var_dump($page_id_array[1]);
     //NULL

EDIT: After answer and comments from jasonbar I did the test which confirms his answer:

     $page_id_array = explode("&page",$page_string);
     $page_id = $page_id_array[0]; 
     var_dump($page_id); 
     //string(2) "15"

Answer 1

I think my comment seems a likely explanation. I tried out your code using “15&page” as the test string and it explodes properly using ‘&page’ as the delimiter.

Make sure the & isn’t actually encoded as &

You could try print_r’ing the array you get back from explode() to see if thats really the case. If so you would end up with 15, amp;page when exploding on just ‘&’.