How to convert a string to an array with PHP

Converting a string to an array is a pretty common task when programming in PHP.
If you don’t know much about PHP you could easily fall into a situation where
you’re manually looping through each character in a string checking for a
delimiter or keeping a counter and assembling strings of the same length and
assigning the value to a new array. Fortunately PHP has you covered!

Split a string by a string

Splitting a string by a string is a common way to deal with data that has a
delimiter separating each value or to be able to break a sentence apart into
individual words.

$string = 'One, Two, Three, Four, Five'
$array  = explode(', ', $string

Split a string into chunks

Chunking allows you to split a string into parts of equal length (except the
last one which could be shorter). The common use case is when you have a really
long string and you want to make it a bit more visually appealing.

$string = '12345abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
$array  = str_split($string, 5
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About Josh

Husband. Father. Pug dad. Musician. Founder of Holiday API, Head of Engineering and Emoji Specialist at Mailshake, and author of the best damn Lorem Ipsum Library for PHP.


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