Regex: Parsing after 16 occurrences of a character?

/* Edited to make sense! */

I 900 lines of this:

;745;ref;name;Adress;zipcode;;mobphone;;;;;;;;;

i want 900 lines of this:

array(
  '',
  745,
  'ref',
  'name',
  'adress',
  'zipcode',
  '',
  'mobphone'
  etc.开发者_如何学Go.
)

Some of the lines appear to be concated to one, so it's one long instead of two short. I need to use PHP's split() function to split the lines after every 16th semicolon character, that's what i need your help with.

I don't know if this will help you, but PHP already contains functionality which allows you to parse a CSV file. The fgetcsv() function will read a CSV file line by line. It returns an array containing the values of each field in the current row.

In your case, you would need to tell it to use a semi-colon instead of a comma as the field delimiter.

$fp = fopen('file.csv', 'r');
while ($line = fgetcsv($fp, 0, ';')){
  $firstField = $line[0];
  $secondField = $line[1];
  //...
}

Take a look at explode: http://php.net/manual/en/function.explode.php