break a word in letters php

I want to accept a string from a form and then break it into an array of characters using PHP, for example:

$a = 'professor';
$b[0] == 'p';
$b[1] == 'r';
$b[2] == 'o';
.
.
.
.
.
$b[8] = 'r';

From stackoverflow

• You don't need to do that. In PHP you can access your characters directly from the string as if it where an array:

  $var = "My String";
  echo $var[1]; // Will print "y".
  

  gargantaun : I didn't know that. good tip.

  whichdan : FYI, $var{1} will work, but it's being deprecated as of PHP6 in favor of $var[1].

• str_split($word);
  

  This is faster than accessing $word as an array. (And also better in that you can iterate through it with foreach().) Documentation.

  St. John Johnson : Why is it faster? It just returns an array.

  Seb : It is not faster; in fact, it's slower - it has to create an additional array and see where to split the original string depending on the second parameter.

  orlandu63 : You're correct: a benchmark confirms that this is 50% slower than your method.

• Be careful because the examples above only work if you are treating ASCII (single byte) strings.

• If you really want the individual characters in a variable of array type, as opposed to just needing to access the character by index, use:

  $b = str_split($a)
  

  Otherwise, just use $a[0], $a[1], etc...

  PROFESSOR : thanks for the answer............it worked