[SOLVED] Explode a string with two delimiters into an array

Explode a string with two delimiters into an array

I'm trying to build a bi-dimensional array from a string. The string has this structure:

$workers = "name1:age1/name2:age2/name3:age3";

The idea is to explode the array into "persons" using "/" as separator, and then using ":" to explode each "person" into an array that would contain "name" and "age".

I know the basics about the explode function:

$array = explode("separator", "$string");

But I have no idea how to face this to make it bidimensional.

Solution

Something like the following should work. The goal is to first split the data into smaller chunks, and then step through each chunk and further subdivide it as needed.

$row = 0;
foreach (explode("/", $workers) as $substring) {
    $col = 0;
    foreach (explode(":", $substring) as $value) {
        $array[$row][$col] = $value;
        $col++;
    }
    $row++;
}