In what scenarios would the split function be more appropriate than explode in PHP?

The split function in PHP is more appropriate than explode when you need to use a regular expression to split a string into an array. This can be useful when you need more flexibility in defining the delimiter pattern or when you need to split the string based on multiple delimiters.

$string = "Hello, World! This is a test";
$delimiter = '/[,.! ]+/';
$result = preg_split($delimiter, $string);
print_r($result);