Why does explode return whole array?

Question

This code returns whole array instead false or NULL, because there are not matches by mask ;

$a = " 6 . 2 . 828194 . 2 . 3 .";

var_dump(explode(';', $a));

How to solve this feature?

Result is:

array(1) { [0]=> string(25) " 6 . 2 . 828194 . 2 . 3 ." }

Answer 1

You can just test if the delimiter is there before exploding and do what you want if it's not there.

$a = " 6 . 2 . 828194 . 2 . 3 .";
$delim = ";";

if(strpos($a, $delim) !== false){
    var_dump(explode($delim, $a));
}else{
    echo "null";
    // Or
    // $a[] = Null;
}

Result: null