PHP split alternative?

Assuming you are using UTF-8 (or you can convert it to UTF-8 using Iconv or some other tools), then using the u modifier (doc: http://www.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php )

<?
    $s = "FrontPage 2000???????";
    print_r(preg_match_all('/./u', $s, $matches));
    echo "n";
    print_r($matches);
?>

will give

21
Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => F
            [1] => r
            [2] => o
            [3] => n
            [4] => t
            [5] => P
            [6] => a
            [7] => g
            [8] => e
            [9] =>  
            [10] => 2
            [11] => 0
            [12] => 0
            [13] => 0
            [14] => ?
            [15] => ?
            [16] => ?
            [17] => ?
            [18] => ?
            [19] => ?
            [20] => ?
        )

)

Note that my source code is stored in a file encoded in UTF-8 also, for the $s to contain those characters.

The following will match alphanumeric as a group:

<?
$s = "FrontPage 2000???????";
print_r(preg_match_all('/(w+)|(.)/u', $s, $matches));
echo "n";
print_r($matches[0]);
?>

result:

10
Array
(
    [0] => FrontPage
    [1] =>  
    [2] => 2000
    [3] => ?
    [4] => ?
    [5] => ?
    [6] => ?
    [7] => ?
    [8] => ?
    [9] => ?
)

preg_split() is similar to the old ereg-function split(). You only have to enclose the regex in /.../ like so:

preg_split('/www/', 'D:/Projects/job.com/www/www/path/source', 2);

The enclosing slashes / here are really part of the regular expression syntax, not searched for in the string. If the www delimiter is variable, you should additionally use preg_quote() for the inner part.

But note that you don't need regular expressions if you only look for static strings anyway. In such cases you can use explode() pretty much like you used split() before:

explode('www', 'D:/Projects/job.com/www/www/path/source', 2);