I came across the following to split a string into "tokens":
$tokens = preg_split("/[^\-_A-Za-z0-9]+/", $string);
Could somebody explain to me how this is different from this:
$tokens = explode(' ', $string);
Any help would be greatly appreciated :-)
The regular expression you provided:
$tokens = preg_split("/[^\-_A-Za-z0-9]+/", $string);
will split an input string into tokens using a delimiter that is not a dash (-), underscore (_), letter (lowercase or uppercase), or number.
Whereas:
$tokens = explode(' ', $string);
Will only split the string into tokens using whitespace as a delimiter.
The literal reading of [^\-_A-Za-z0-9]+ is:
Match one or more induvidual characters that is not
-or_or a letter A to Z (capitalized or not) or a digit.
preg_split will split the input based on matches to the above, but explode will only split on a whitespace literal. There are other characters not excluded from the regular expression which preg_split will split on but explode won't, so the resulting arrays could be different.
