When using the PREG_SPLIT_OFFSET_CAPTURE option you will end up with all results in a single array, which is often undesirable as it means you then have to filter out any delimiters you wanted to check for but not keep.
To get around this you can instead use preg_match_all() to perform the split. For comparison, here are two examples, both splitting around colon and semi-colon characters:
<?php $pieces_with_delimiters = preg_split('/[;:]/', $input, -1, PREG_SPLIT_OFFSET_CAPTURE); ?>
<?php preg_match_all('/([^;:]*)([;:]|$)/', $input, $matches);
list(, $pieces, $delimiters) = $matches ?>
The latter requires a more complex pattern, but produces a much more convenient set of results to work with, depending upon what you want to do with them.
