PHP: Split string into array, like explode with no delimiter - php

Question

I have a string such as:
"0123456789"
And I need to split each character into an array.
I, for the hell of it, tried:
explode('', '123545789');
But it gave me the obvious: Warning: No delimiter defined in explode) ..
How would I come across this? I can't see any method off hand, especially just a function.

Answer 1

$array = str_split("0123456789bcdfghjkmnpqrstvwxyz");
str_split takes an optional 2nd param, the chunk length (default 1), so you can do things like:
$array = str_split("aabbccdd", 2);
// $array[0] = aa
// $array[1] = bb
// $array[2] = cc etc ...
You can also get at parts of your string by treating it as an array:
$string = "hello";
echo $string[1];
// outputs "e"

Answer 2

You can access characters in a string just like an array:
$s = 'abcd';
echo $s[0];
prints 'a'

Answer 3

Try this:
$str = '123456789';
$char_array = preg_split('//', $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);

Answer 4

str_split can do the trick. Note that strings in PHP can be accessed just like a character array. In most cases, you won't need to split your string into a "new" array.

Answer 5

Here is an example that works with multibyte (UTF-8) strings.
$str = 'äbcd';
// PHP 5.4.8 allows null as the third argument of mb_strpos() function
do {
$arr[] = mb_substr( $str, 0, 1, 'utf-8' );
} while ( $str = mb_substr( $str, 1, mb_strlen( $str ), 'utf-8' ) );
It can be also done with preg_split() (preg_split( '//u', $str, null, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY )), but unlike the above example, that runs almost as fast regardless of the size of the string, preg_split() is fast with small strings, but a lot slower with large ones.

Answer 6

Try this:
$str = '546788';
$char_array = preg_split('//', $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);

Answer 7

Try this:
$str = "Hello Friend";
$arr1 = str_split($str);
$arr2 = str_split($str, 3);
print_r($arr1);
print_r($arr2);
The above example will output:
Array
(
[0] => H
[1] => e
[2] => l
[3] => l
[4] => o
[5] =>
[6] => F
[7] => r
[8] => i
[9] => e
[10] => n
[11] => d
)
Array
(
[0] => Hel
[1] => lo
[2] => Fri
[3] => end
)

Answer 8

If you want to split the string, it's best to use:
$array = str_split($string);
When you have a delimiter, which separates the string, you can try,
explode('', $string);
Where you can pass the delimiter in the first variable inside the explode such as:
explode(',', $string);

Answer 9

$array = str_split("$string");
will actually work pretty fine, but if you want to preserve the special characters in that string, and you want to do some manipulation with them, then I would use
do {
$array[] = mb_substr($string, 0, 1, 'utf-8');
} while ($string = mb_substr($string, 1, mb_strlen($string), 'utf-8'));
because for some of mine personal uses, it has been shown to be more reliable when there is an issue with special characters.