Passing a php variable as a delimiter to php explode()

Question

I am trying to pass a php variable as a delimiter to explode(). The variable's value is being fetched from an html form.

form:

<select name="delimiter">
<option value="\t">Tab Space</option>
<option value=",">Comma (,)</option>
<option value=";">Semi colon (;)</option>
<option value="&">Ampersand (&)</option>
<option value="|">Pipe (|)</option>
</select>

php:

$delimiter=$_POST['delimiter'];
$arr=explode($delimiter, $line);

Above doesn't seem to work. It does not recognize the delimiter and hence gives me a single element in $arr i.e. same as $line. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you

Answer 1

why don`t you use preg_split for this.. for example

<select name="delimiter">
<option value="\t">Tab Space</option>
<option value=",">Comma (,)</option>
<option value=";">Semi colon (;)</option>
<option value="&">Ampersand (&)</option>
<option value="\|">Pipe (|)</option>
</select>

and php script

$delimiter =  $_POST['delimiter'];

$arr =  preg_split("/".$delimiter."/", $line);