How to extract all alphabetical characters from a string and store as a 1-dim array?

Question

I have a variable $var = "My name's Ankit". I want to store all the English alphabet characters of $var into an array $charvar. I know that I can use a simple for loop over the entire length of $var and array_push the characters if they are English characters else ignore. However, I wanted to know if PHP provides some function which can do this. What I want in $charvar is:

Array
(
        [0] => M
        [1] => y
        [2] => n
        [3] => a
        [4] => m
        [5] => e
        [6] => s
        [7] => A
        [8] => n
        [9] => k
        [10] => i
        [11] => t
)

Answer 1

The other answers are not good enough.

This does EXACTLY what you want in one step / one function. Split the string on zero or more non-alphabetical characters.

Code (Demo):

$var = "My name's Ankit";
$charvar = preg_split('/[^a-z]*/i', $var, 0, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
var_export($charvar);

Output: (no subarrays)

array (
  0 => 'M',
  1 => 'y',
  2 => 'n',
  3 => 'a',
  4 => 'm',
  5 => 'e',
  6 => 's',
  7 => 'A',
  8 => 'n',
  9 => 'k',
  10 => 'i',
  11 => 't',
)