Blogging Tips

ASP: the split function and arrays

The ASP split function is used to - guess what - split a string into specific parts. The resulting number of items is variable and depends on how we use the function.
Basically the split function has the following syntax:

VarArray = split(string, delimiter, numberOfItems)

where:
1) string is the string to be split;
2) delimiter is the element used to determine where to split the string;
3) numberOfItems is optional and limits the number of returned items in the array.

Let's see some examples.

<%
Dim VarString
Dim VarArray
VarString = "Welcome to The Web Thought!"
VarArray = split(VarString, " ")
For each item in VarArray
  response.write(item & "<br>")
Next
%>

The output of the above code will be:

Welcome
to
The
Web
Thought!

If we change the split function and add a limit to the number of items in the array:

split(VarString, " ", 3)

the output will be:

Welcome
to
The Web Thought!

Having said that, the split function might become very useful if we need to store dynamic information in a database and retrieve them storing them in an array. We can, for example, store a list of available colour codes for a specific product, separating them by a semicolon:

A1;A2;A3;A4

then we can store the recordset field item in a string and split it using ";" as delimiter:

VarArray = split("A1;A2;A3;A4", ";")

The output will be:

A1
A2
A3
A4

I hope you've found the above information useful for your projects. In the meantime, happy programming!