explode a WORD into separate letters

Anon

Hello!

I'm trying to "explode" a variable, which is a word, into it's component letters.

For example:

<?
$name = "John";
$name_letter = explode("","$name");
// I realize that you can't explode nothing because a delimiter doesn't exist

print "$name_letter[0]";
// the result would be the letter "J"

print "$name_letter[1]";
// the result would be the letter "o"

// and so on ...
?>

I have been searching the 'net all day for an example of how to do this. I understand that if the variable name contained elements that could be used to explode the word, however, that's not how I want the information inputted originally.

My intention is to have the name display on the page in a graphical format from images that I created. So the end result would be something like this:
<IMG src="j.gif" width=30 height=30>
<IMG src="o.gif" width=30 height=30>
<IMG src="h.gif" width=30 height=30>
<IMG src="n.gif" width=30 height=30>

If someone could help me, I would really appreciate it.

maxholman

You could try something like this...

<?php

$name = 'John';

for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($name); $i++) {
print '<IMG src="' . $name[$i] . '.gif" width=30 height=30>';
}

Max Holman
Blue Roo Software
http://www.blueroo.net

Anon

The docs for explode() suggest to look at preg_split() - there you'll find the code snippet:

Splitting a string into component characters.

$str = 'string';
$chars = preg_split('//', $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
print_r($chars);

fitzbean

You could just set up a loop and explode it manually.

$a = 'john';
$c = strlen($a);

for ($i = 0; $i < $c; $i++)
{
$name_letter[$i] = $a[$i];
}

Anon

I wanted to take a moment to thank the three people above who helped me with this project. Your help is appreciated!

You can view the results at http://www.seibertron.com/misc/carly/

Enjoy!