explode and escape character for string separator

Hi all, Suppose I have a long string like $myStr = "$string1:$string2:$string3"; I can obviously explode them using ":" as the separator. But what if $string1 contains the character ":" by itself? I was thinking, first I am gonna put an escaping character, so I can do something like: $string1 = str_replace(":", "\:", $string1); But that still won't work with explode. So, what can I use instead of explode? Anything simple, and fast? This is a hypothetical situation. The real situation is that I am trying to have a protocol for data sent by client using Flash. But the basic question remains. Thanks for any help. RDB -- ------------------------------------------------- /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign against HTML \ / email and proprietary format X attachments. / \ ------------------------------------------------- Have you been used by Microsoft today? Choose your life. Choose freedom. Choose LINUX. -------------------------------------------------