How can I turn this string into a key value array? - php

Question

I have a string like the one below, including the parenthesis:
("string" "value" "string" "value" "string" "value" ...)
The number of quoted parts are unknown with a minimum of one pair, I would like to turn this into an associative array, my desired result is:
array('string'=>$value,'string'=>$value, 'string'=>$value)
How could I do this? Preferably, I would like to use a built-in function or a one liner or create a custom function, any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

How to use build-in functions :)
$str = '("string" "value" "string1" "value1" "string2" "value2")';
$str = preg_replace('~^\("|"\)$~', '', $str);
$ar = explode('" "', $str);
$ar = array_chunk($ar,2);
$ar = array_column($ar, 1, 0);
print_r($ar);
demo

Answer 2

<?php
$str='("foo" "bar" "ying" "yang" "apple" "orange")';
$cols = str_getcsv(trim($str, '()'), ' ');
$chunked = array_chunk($cols, 2);
$result = array_column($chunked, 1, 0);
var_dump($cols, $chunked, $result);
Output:
array(6) {
[0]=>
string(3) "foo"
[1]=>
string(3) "bar"
[2]=>
string(4) "ying"
[3]=>
string(4) "yang"
[4]=>
string(5) "apple"
[5]=>
string(6) "orange"
}
array(3) {
[0]=>
array(2) {
[0]=>
string(3) "foo"
[1]=>
string(3) "bar"
}
[1]=>
array(2) {
[0]=>
string(4) "ying"
[1]=>
string(4) "yang"
}
[2]=>
array(2) {
[0]=>
string(5) "apple"
[1]=>
string(6) "orange"
}
}
array(3) {
["foo"]=>
string(3) "bar"
["ying"]=>
string(4) "yang"
["apple"]=>
string(6) "orange"
}

Answer 3

One way is to match the pattern of a pair of quoted strings, then fill the result array in a callback function using the two strings from the match.
preg_replace_callback('/"([^"]+)" "([^"]+)"/', function($match) use (&$result) {
$result[$match[1]] = $match[2];
}, $str);