It's only a good thing IF you have mysqli, and as we all know servers aren't maintained equally. Mine has no mysqli and no PDO, doubtless other's lack these too--lacking either one, both, or neither. It is a design flaw not to prepare for these possibilities, in my opinion.

I too have used the method, as I said before, without error.

Just a thought, but to split the string by ';' yields preceding whitespace, so the rtrim mention should be an ltrim.

__________________
Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning. - Rich Cook