Splitting up a string into an array [PHP]

Question

I am trying to split a string, and the string is (in MySQL):

"Accident (&amp); Travel;Car (&amp); Motorcycle."

You see, there are actually only two elements that I want to be in the array, [0] would be: "Accident & Travel, [1] would be the Car & Motorcycle".

I used a delimiter (explode) for this one and imposed a delimiter with (";").
Now, the problem is, the symbol "&" in MySQL is translated into (&amp); (without the bracket), meaning now my string is split like they have 4 elements instead of 2:

"[0] = Accident &, [1] = Travel, [2] = Car &, [3] = Motorcycle."

How do I solve this ? I heard of preg_split before, but I'm not sure how to use it.

The php explode that I used:
"$string = "Accident (&amp); Travel; Car (&amp); Motorcycle"; $points = explode(";", $string); ?> <ul> <?php for ($x = 0; $x < count($points); $x++) { echo "<li>$points[$x]</li>";
}"

Answer 1

It's not really clear, but if I read the question correctly, the values are stored in the database without the brackets. So as:

Accident & Travel;Car & Motorcycle.

Then it would seem that the strings are encoded using something like htmlspecialchars before you store them.

To decode them, you could use htmlspecialchars_decode() before you explode.

However, this really shouldn't be necessary:

• You should not encode your data for use in html before you store it in the database; you never know what you might need it for so you should probably store it as it is (after validation...). When you output it, you encode as the output medium requires.
• You should not store multiple values in one database field; you should normalize your database, that will make data retrieval a lot easier.

Answer 2

// original string
$string = "Accident & Travel;Car & Motorcycle.";

// replace the troublesome '&' string
$string = str_replace('&', '&', $string);

// split the string at the remaining ';'
$points = explode(";", $string);