Broke string into vars with variable position - php

Question

I need to broke a string into some vars but its order is not fixed as the exemple:
$string = "name='John';phone='555-5555';city='oakland';";
$string2 = "city='oakland';phone='555-5555';name='John';";
$string3 = "phone='555-5555';name='John';city='oakland';";
so I need to broke the strings into:
$name
$phone
$city
if the position would be fixed i could use explode and call for the array key that i need like
$brokenString = explode("'",$string);
$name = $brokenString[1];
$phone = $brokenString[3];
$city = $brokenString[5];
however how could I do it with variable position??

Answer 1

One way to do it with sort to make the position same always for all string variables.
<?php
$string = "name='John';phone='555-5555';city='oakland';";
$string2 = "city='oakland';phone='555-5555';name='John';";
$string3 = "phone='555-5555';name='John';city='oakland';";
$array = explode(';',$string3);
sort($array);
$array = array_filter($array); # remove the empty element
foreach($array as $value){
$split = explode('=',$value);
$result[$split[0]] = $split[1];
}
extract($result); # extract result as php variables
echo "\$city = $city; \$name = $name; \$phone = $phone";
?>
EDIT: As using extract() is generally not a good idea.You can use simple foreach() instead of extract(),
foreach($result as $k => $v) {
$$k = $v;
}
WORKING DEMO: https://3v4l.org/RB8pT

Answer 2

There might be a simpler method, but what I've done is created an array $stringVariables which holds the exploded strings.
This array is then looped through and strpos is used in each element in the exploded string array to see if it contains 'city', 'phone', or 'name'. Depending on which one, it's added to an array which holds either all the names, cities or phone numbers.
$stringVariables = array();
$phones = array();
$names = array();
$cities = array();
$stringVariables[] = explode(";",$string);
$stringVariables[] = explode(";",$string2);
$stringVariables[] = explode(";",$string3);
foreach($stringVariables as $stringVariable) {
foreach($stringVariable as $partOfString) {
if(strpos($partOfString, "name=") !== false) {
$names[] = $partOfString;
}else if(strpos($partOfString, "city=") !== false) {
$cities[] = $partOfString;
}else if(strpos($partOfString, "phone=") !== false) {
$phones[] = $partOfString;
}
}
}

Answer 3

An alternative way is to convert it into something that can be parsed as a URL string.
First part is to change the values and , from 'John', to John& using a regex ('([^']+)'; which looks for a ' up to a ' followed by a ;), then parse the result (using parse_str())...
$string = "name='John';phone='555-5555';city='oakland';";
$string = preg_replace("/'([^']+)';/","$1&", $string);
echo $string.PHP_EOL;
parse_str( $string, $values );
print_r($values);
gives the output of
name=John&phone=555-5555&city=oakland&
Array
(
[name] => John
[phone] => 555-5555
[city] => oakland
)
or just using regex's...
preg_match_all("/(\w*)?='([^']+)';/", $string, $matches);
print_r(array_combine($matches[1], $matches[2]));