PHP explode equivalent for javascript

January 9, 2014 JS / jQuery, Snippets

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PHP explode equivalent for javascript

Very often you have to perform operations on strings to split them, to obtain only a desired piece of it. If the string is formatted in a way that allows you to split, eg. you know the delimiters, you can use the following way to do this.

Problem

Let’s say you have a string delimited by some sort of characters, and you want to split that string after that character to store it into an array.

var string = 'firstpart_secondpart_thirdpart';

1	var string = 'firstpart_secondpart_thirdpart';

Solution

We would use the function split to do this, see bellow example:

var string = 'firstpart_secondpart_thirdpart';
var arrData = string.split("_");

1 2	var string = 'firstpart_secondpart_thirdpart'; var arrData = string.split("_");

Output

Now you have an array with each of your parts of the string and you can access it directly:

alert( arrData[0] );   //outputs 'firstpart'
alert( arrData[1] );   //outputs 'secondpart'
alert( arrData[2] );   //outputs 'thirdpart'

alert( arrData[0] ); //outputs 'firstpart'

alert( arrData[1] ); //outputs 'secondpart'

alert( arrData[2] ); //outputs 'thirdpart'

Note! If an empty string (“”) is used as the separator, the string is split between each character. The split() method does not change the original string.