How can I split a string in PHP at the nth occurrence of a needle?

Question

There must be a fast and efficient way to split a (text) string at the "nth" occurrence of a needle, but I cannot find it. There is a fairly full set of functions in the strpos comments in the PHP manual, but that seems a bit much for what I need.

I have plain text as $string and want to split it at nth occurrence of $needle, and in my case, needle is simply a space. (I can do the sanity checks!)

How can I do it?

Answer 1

It could be:

function split2($string, $needle, $nth) {     $max = strlen($string);     $n = 0;     for ($i=0; $i<$max; $i++) {         if ($string[$i] == $needle) {             $n++;             if ($n >= $nth) {                 break;             }         }     }     $arr[] = substr($string, 0, $i);     $arr[] = substr($string, $i+1, $max);      return $arr; }