CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phparraysstringexplodetext-parsing
Lincecum
Lincecum

Reputation: 825

Convert formatted lines of delimited text into an associative array

I have a string of key->value pairs in the following colon-separated format:

MIME-Version: 1.0
From: "Tim Lincecum"
Reply-To: "Tim Lincecum"
Return-path: "Tim Lincecum"
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Subject: Giants Win World Series!

How do I get an associative array such that arr['From'] = "Tim Lincecum", etc.?

I know there's the explode() function, but the only delimiter I see (colon) is in the middle of a key and a value rather than between each pair. How can I approach this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 13543

Answers (4)

mickmackusa
mickmackusa

Reputation: 48001

Avoiding a regular expression approach while parsing a text format that is not handled by a native PHP function/library will require exploding on one delimiter, then looping those results and exploding on another delimiter.

For simplicity and control, just use preg_match_all(), then use array_column() to form the associative structure from the payload of captured substrings.

Code: (Demo)

preg_match_all(
    '/^([^:]+): (.+)/m',
    $string,
    $m,
    PREG_SET_ORDER
);
var_export(
    array_column($m, 2, 1)
);

The m pattern modifier changes the meaning of ^ from "start of the string" to "start of a line".

If you'd like to remove the double quote wrapping that appears on some of the values, here is the pattern adjustment: Demo

/^([^:]+): ("?)(.+)\2/m

Upvotes: 0

alex
alex

Reputation: 490461

You could always use regex :)

PHP

$str = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n" .
'From: "Tim Lincecum"' . "\r\n" . 
'Reply-To: "Tim Lincecum"' . "\r\n" . 
'Return-path: "Tim Lincecum"' . "\r\n" . 
'Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n" . 
'Subject: Giants Win World Series!';

preg_match_all('/(.*?):\s?(.*?)(\r\n|$)/', $str, $matches);
 
$headers = array_combine(array_map('trim', $matches[1]), $matches[2]);
 
var_dump($headers);

Output

array(6) {
  ["MIME-Version"]=>
  string(3) "1.0"
  ["From"]=>
  string(14) ""Tim Lincecum""
  ["Reply-To"]=>
  string(14) ""Tim Lincecum""
  ["Return-path"]=>
  string(14) ""Tim Lincecum""
  ["Content-Type"]=>
  string(29) "text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"
  ["Subject"]=>
  string(24) "Giants Win World Series!"
}

See it on IDEone.

Upvotes: 7

Jonah
Jonah

Reputation: 10091

$temp = explode("\r\n", $string);
$sets = array();
foreach ($temp as $value) {
    $array = explode(': ', $value);
    $array[1] = trim($array[1], '"');
    $sets[$array[0]] = $array[1];
}

$string is the value you're getting from the database.

Upvotes: 3

zerkms
zerkms

Reputation: 255025

Since I did a good guess in comments - I think i need to repeat it here as an answer:

There is a newlines between parameters, so with

$parameters_pairs = explode("\r\n", $parameters_string);

you can split it into the name-value pairs, separated with colon.

Upvotes: 2

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