explode individual characters

[themanwhowas]

<?PHP

$var = 'hello everybody

$tar = explode('', $var);

foreach($tar as $key => $val)
{
if($val != 'e')
{
echo $val;
}
}

?>

this does not work. the error tells me that the explode delimeter is empty but this is what i want. im trying to explode the string into an array of its letters instead of just its words. is there another way of doing this then?
thanks

[NogDog]

[man]str_split/man should do the job for you.

[dbchip2000]

If that's all you're doing with the explode, you may simply try:

echo(str_replace('e', '', $var));

Or, if you are on PHP4/3 and want to use NogDog's method (http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.str-split.php#70797):

$val = array_slice(split("-l-", chunk_split($val, 1, '-l-')), 0, -1);

[themanwhowas]

im not just trying to remove letters. i dont know why i added the if conditional to the example to be honest. im very ill and delirious. thank you both. i'll try nogdogs suggestion