Best way to turn a string into 2 variables

I'm having some trouble parsing a f开发者_开发技巧irst name and last name from a string into 2 different variables.

The string is always in this format: "Smith, John" or "Doe, Jane"

Is there a function out that can split the first and last name to 2 different variables to something like...

$firstname = "John"
$lastname = "Smith"

Use list with explode like this:

list($firstname, $lastname) = explode(',', $yourString);

You may need to use trim to remove any whitespace from those vars.

explode() splits a string based upon another string and returns an array.

You could do:

$name = "Smith, John";

$name_array = array();

$name_array = explode(",", $name);

I would go with regexp for this so that there could be slight variations in the input (i.e. "Smith, John", "Smith ,John", "Smith , John" or "Smith,John")

You could do something like this for regexp "\w([a-z]+)\w" and then last name would be your first match and first name would be your second match.

$name = "Smith, John";
$expl = explode(', ', $name);
$firstname = $expl[1];
$lastname = $expl[0];
echo $firstname.' '.$lastname;