String Parsing

[lives4him06]

I have the following string:

$str = "maryland, virginia, atlanta, new york";

I want to have an array containing each of the coma separated variables as follows:

$strArr[0] = "maryland";
$strArr[1] = "virginia";
$strArr[2] = "atlanta";
$strArr[3] = "atlanta";
$strArr[4] = "new york";

I know this is relatively simple string manipulation, but i just cant figure it out. How can i do this?

[laserlight]

Use [man]explode/man with [man]trim/man.

[bradgrafelman]

If you use ', ' as your delimiter for explode(), there shouldn't be any need to use trim()... unless the string can possibly be malformed, e.g. "city1, cty2, city3, "

[NogDog]

Or use preg_split to cope with any variations:

$strArr = preg_split('/\s*,\s*/', $str);