getting a $value into array

I am attempting to email to multiple recipients. I am using swiftmailer and following their guidelines. When I try to get the admins to email to it is erroring

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Swift_RfcComplianceException' with message 'Address in mailbox given

The outputted format from my db is $admins = "'email_1@email.com', 'email_2@email.com'";

The code from swiftmailer required for multiple is

$message->setTo(array('some@address.tld', 'other@address.tld'));

I have attempted everything I can think of to output in the same format as this, ie.
$message->setTo(array($admins));

This appears to echo them in the right format for the mailer however I still get the exception. If I manually right the addresses into the code as oppose to using a variable from the DB query it works. So it doesnt like echoing in the value string.. Any help please!?

Let me get this straight you store multiple admin emails in one database field and you separate them by comma in your database?
I don't know why you would store them like that but if you lose the single quotes around the emails and do something like this:

$admins = "email_1@email.com, email_2@email.com";

$admin_ary = explode(',', $admins);
$message->setTo($admin_ary);


Then it should work.

But I would still recommend you two store the emails in separate rows.
That way you could do a while loop to make your email array.

Thanks, that did the trick. The reason that I have data stored int his way is that it is a configuration table for the group. Most will have only 1 email but occasionally there may be a requirement for 2-5 people to receive the email. Cheers