Also for the future, if you ever want to know what PHP wants you to use if something is deprecated you can always check out the function in the manual and it will tell you alternatives.
split is deprecated since it is part of the family of functions which make use of POSIX regular expressions; that entire family is deprecated in favour of the PCRE (preg_*) functions.
If you do not need the regular expression functionality, then explode is a very good choice (and would have been recommended over split even if that were not deprecated), if on the other hand you do need to use regular expressions then the PCRE alternate is simply preg_split.