CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phparraysquery-stringexplodearray-key
objelland
objelland

Reputation: 119

Why isn't php explode extracting array values

I have some date values (each with a trailing = sign) stored as a &-delimited string.

My $_POST['dates'] string looks like this:

23.08.18=&22.08.18=&21.08.18=

I'm trying the following PHP code to extract the dates before inserting them into my database table. The code is currently not working.

foreach(explode('&', $_POST['dates']) as $value)  
{
    $value1 = explode('=', $value);
    foreach ($value1 as $x) {
    }
}

How can I isolate the date values?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 573

Answers (2)

mickmackusa
mickmackusa

Reputation: 48000

The function that you might be looking for is parse_str(). You have a valid query string (well, kind of) with keys but no values, so you merely need to parse it and isolate the keys(dates). Unfortunately, the parser converts your dots to underscores.

Code: (Demo)

$string = '23.08.18=&22.08.18=&21.08.18=';
parse_str($string, $out);
var_export(array_keys($out));

Output:

array (
  0 => '23_08_18',
  1 => '22_08_18',
  2 => '21_08_18',
)

And of course, you can repair the modified date values with str_replace(). See this demo.

Or if you want to disregard parse_str(), you can use just one regex call that divides the string on = followed by an optional &:

Code: (Demo)

$string = '23.08.18=&22.08.18=&21.08.18=';
var_export(preg_split('~=&?~', $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY));

Output:

array (
  0 => '23.08.18',
  1 => '22.08.18',
  2 => '21.08.18',
)

Or without regex, just trim the last = and explode on =&: (Demo)

$string = '23.08.18=&22.08.18=&21.08.18=';
var_export(explode('=&', rtrim($string, '=')));
// same output as preg_split()

Upvotes: 3

Khoa Truong
Khoa Truong

Reputation: 933

<?php

$data = '23.08.18=&22.08.18=&21.08.18=';

//$delimiters has to be array
//$string has to be array

function multiexplode ($delimiters,$string) {

 $ary = explode($delimiters[0],$string);
 array_shift($delimiters);
 if($delimiters != NULL) {
    foreach($ary as $key => $val) {
        $ary[$key] = multiexplode($delimiters, $val);
    }
 }
 return  $ary;
}

$exploded = multiexplode(array("=","&"),$data);

var_dump($exploded);

The result should be:

array (size=3)
  0 => string '23.08.18' (length=8)
  2 => string '22.08.18' (length=8)
  4 => string '21.08.18' (length=8)

We need to use array_filter.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.explode.php

[EDIT] mickmackusa's answer is the right tool for parse url parameters into variables.

Upvotes: 0

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