How to explode a string on <br/> tag

Question

I have a string like following

Overall Queen Poster <br /> Queen Poster Headboard:<br /> Queen Poster <br /> Queen Footboard  <br /> Queen Poster Rails: 62.28"W x 84.02"D x 18.07"H - 37lbs.

How to explode it on
tag so that I can get the values in an array?

I tried this

   $myString =  "Overall Queen Poster <br /> Queen Poster Headboard:<br /> Queen Poster <br /> Queen Footboard  <br /> Queen Poster Rails: 62.28"W x 84.02"D x 18.07"H - 37lbs";
    $myArray = explode("\n",$myString);
    print_r($myArray);

But not getting correct result.

Answer 1

That's because <br /> != \n.

You can use regex to split it, to make sure that you get all the BR tags (<br>, <br />, <br/>, <br class="break">, <BR> etc.)

Code:

<?php
    $myString = 'Overall Queen Poster <br /> Queen Poster Headboard:<br /> Queen Poster <br /> Queen Footboard  <br /> Queen Poster Rails: 62.28"W x 84.02"D x 18.07"H - 37lbs.';

    $myArray = preg_split('/<br[^>]*>/i', $myString);

    print_r($myArray);
?>

Outputs:

Array
(
    [0] => Overall Queen Poster 
    [1] =>  Queen Poster Headboard:
    [2] =>  Queen Poster 
    [3] =>  Queen Footboard  
    [4] =>  Queen Poster Rails: 62.28"W x 84.02"D x 18.07"H - 37lbs.
)

DEMO

Limitations:

Will split on any HTML tags that start with br. Meaning that if you made your own tag, such as <breadcrumb>, this would mistakenly be seen as a line break.

Alternatives:

• explode('<br />', $myString) if you're sure that your tags will always be exactly <br />
• preg_split('/<br\s*/?>/i', $myString) if you have tags such as <breadcrumb> and don't have any attributes in any <br> tag.

Extra notes:

If you don't want white-space in your matches, you can change your regex to /<br[^>]*>\s*/i which will also match any white-space characters after the match. Alternatively, you can run it through ltrim with $myArray = array_map('ltrim', $myArray);.