How Can I Exclude Empty Elements When Exploding Strings in PHP?

Excluding Empty Elements When Exploding Strings

PHP's explode function is a versatile tool for splitting a string into an array of substrings. However, it can sometimes return empty elements when there are leading, trailing, or consecutive delimiters. This can be problematic when working with strings that require non-empty elements.

To address this, it is possible to use the preg_split function instead. preg_split takes regular expressions as delimiters and can be configured to exclude empty elements.

Modified Function:

A modified version of the explode function can be defined as follows to exclude empty elements:

function different_explode($delimiter, $string, $limit = -1, $flags = 0) {
  return preg_split("@$delimiter@", $string, $limit, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY | $flags);
}

Usage:

To use this modified function, simply pass the delimiter, string, and any optional parameters as you would with the original explode function. The following example shows how to exclude empty elements when splitting the string '1/2//3/' on the delimiter '/':

$exploded = different_explode('/', '1/2//3/');

This will result in an array containing only the non-empty elements:

array(3) {
  [0]=>
  string(1) "1"
  [1]=>
  string(1) "2"
  [2]=>
  string(1) "3"
}

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