Parsing Strings

[Milamber]

Hulo.

I am (confused).

I know this should be a very simple thing to do, but I just cant figure the logistics out of how to do it. That and I KNOW it is sitting there staring at me.

Here;s the deal, When a user submits a form it will either have a single entry in a certain field, or multiple entries separated by "," in it. I need a routine that will take the entry and return either a list of the entries and how many there are, OR the single entry.

IE:

i get this: "thing1"

and then the routine returns $things witht the value "thing1".

But if i get this: "thing1, thing2, thing3"

the routine returns this:

$things[0] = thing1
$things[1] = thing2
$things[2] = thing3

How do i do this?

Thanks,
Mil

[Son Nguyen]

Try this piece of code: assume you're using PHP

$things = explode(",",$input);
for ($i=0;$i<count($things);$i++)
{ echo("things[$i] = $thing[$i] ");
}

If the input only has 1 element, the explode will return a one entry-array, which is also appropriate using the same loop. Or if you want if there is one entry, evaluate the array as a scalar?

[Milamber]

Great! I knew it could be done easily. That code will work great, however, just one last quick little thing, what would i do to the string before i exploded it to get rid of ALL the white space in it.

trim() gets the stuff at the beginning and end, but I want to be rid of it all.

Thanks mucho!
-Mil

[Milamber]

Also, what is this scalar thing your talking about?

-Mil

[Son Nguyen]

If you want to remove all spaces, use:
$output = str_replace(" ","",$output);

And the scalar is the simplest type, $a = 1; => $a is a scalar.
And next is array
next is hash (key-value array)
and more.