$pattern
, string $string
[, int $limit = -1
] )
Splits a string into array by regular expression.
Case sensitive regular expression.
If you want to split on any of the characters which are considered special by regular expressions, you'll need to escape them first. If you think split() (or any other regex function, for that matter) is doing something weird, please read the file regex.7, included in the regex/ subdirectory of the PHP distribution. It's in manpage format, so you'll want to do something along the lines of man /usr/local/src/regex/regex.7 in order to read it.
The input string.
If limit is set, the returned array will
contain a maximum of limit elements with the
last element containing the whole rest of
string.
Returns an array of strings, each of which is a substring of
string formed by splitting it on boundaries formed
by the case-sensitive regular expression pattern.
Example #1 split() example
To split off the first four fields from a line from /etc/passwd:
<?php
list($user, $pass, $uid, $gid, $extra) =
split(":", $passwd_line, 5);
?>
Note:
As of PHP 5.3.0, the regex extension is deprecated in favor of the PCRE extension. Calling this function will issue an
E_DEPRECATEDnotice. See the list of differences for help on converting to PCRE.
split() is deprecated as of PHP 5.3.0. preg_split() is the suggested alternative to this function. If you don't require the power of regular expressions, it is faster to use explode(), which doesn't incur the overhead of the regular expression engine.
For users looking for a way to emulate Perl's @chars = split('', $str) behaviour, please see the examples for preg_split() or str_split().
