explode glitch in delimiter

Question

I'm having some trouble with delimiter for explode. I have a rather chunky string as a delimiter, and it seems it breaks down when I add another letter (start of a word), but it doesn't get fixed when I remove first letter, which would indicate it isn't about lenght.

To wit, the (working) code is:

$boom = htmlspecialchars("<td width=25 align=\"center\" "); 
$arr[1] = explode($boom, $arr[1]);

The full string I'd like to use is <td width=25 align=\"center\" class=\", and when I start adding in class, explode breaks down, and nothing gets done. That happens as soon as I add c, and it doesn't go away if I remove <, which it would if it's just a matter of string lenght.

Basically, the problem isn't dire, since I can just replace class=" with "" after the explode, and get the same result, but this has given me headaches to diagnose, and it seems like a really wierd problem. For what it's worth, I'm using PHP 5.3.0 in XAMPP 1.7.2.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Have you tried adding htmlspecialchars to the explode.

$arr[1] = explode($boom, htmlspecialchars($arr[1]));

I get unexpected results without it, but with it it works perfectly.

$s = '<td width=25 align="center" class="asdjasd">sdadasd</td><td width=25 align="center" >asdasD</td>';
$boom = htmlspecialchars("<td width=25 align=\"center\" class=");
$sex = explode($boom, $s);
print_r($sex);

Outputs:

Array
(
    [0] => <td width=25 align="center" class="asdjasd">sdadasd</td><td width=25 align="center" >asdasD</td>
)

Whereas

$s = '<td width=25 align="center" class="asdjasd">sdadasd</td><td width=25 align="center" >asdasD</td>';
$boom = htmlspecialchars("<td width=25 align=\"center\" class=");

$sex = explode($boom, htmlspecialchars($s));
print_r($sex);

Outputs

Array
(
    [0] => 
    [1] => "asdjasd">sdadasd</td><td width=25 align="center" >asdasD</td>

)

This is because $boom is htmlspecialchar encoded, < and > get transformed into &lt; and &gt;, which it cannot find the in the string, so it just returns the whole string.

Answer 2

You could try converting every occurrence of the delimiter in the original string

"<td width=25 align=\"center\" "

in something more manageable like:

"banana"

and then explode on that word