PHP: preg_match_all() - divide an array - php

Question

I have the following code:
$str = '{"ok1", "ok2"},
{"ok3", "ok4"},
{"ok5", "ok6"}';
preg_match_all('/"([^"]*)"/', $str, $matches);
print_r($matches[1]);
which outputs this:
Array ( [0] => ok1 [1] => ok2 [2] => ok3 [3] => ok4 [4] => ok5 [5] => ok6 )
It works perfect but I want to make it array1, array2 and array3. So it will divide the array depending on the tags inside {}
i.e.
`array1` will be `array("ok1", "ok2")`;
`array2` will be `array("ok3", "ok4")`;
`array3` will be `array("ok5", "ok6")`;

Answer 1

Kind of an overkill, but you could indeed achieve it with two regular expressions as well (if this is not some JSON code):
<?php
$string = '{"ok1", "ok2"}, {"ok3", "ok4"}, {"ok5", "ok6"}';
$regex = '~(?<=}),\s~';
$result = array();
$parts = preg_split($regex, $string);
foreach ($parts as $part) {
preg_match_all('~"(?<values>[^"]+)"~', $part, $elements);
$result[] = $elements["values"];
}
echo $result[0][1]; // ok2
?>

Answer 2

Jan's answer is very good and I am only posting mine here as a different way to approach the problem using regex - not to take away from his answer.
If you had a string like this:
$output_array = array();
$str = '{"ok1", "ok2", "ok9", "ok11"},
{"ok3", "ok4"},
{"ok5", "ok6", "ok99"}';
Then you could look for all sets of curly braces and store those into an array:
preg_match_all('~\{.*?\}~', $str, $matches);
Finally, just loop through each set of braces and match each set of data appearing in quotation marks. Then add those matches to your output array.
foreach ($matches[0] AS $set) {
preg_match_all('~".*?"~', $set, $set_matches);
$output_array[] = $set_matches[0];
}
print_r($output_array);
That will give you an array like this:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[0] => "ok1"
[1] => "ok2"
[2] => "ok9"
[3] => "ok11"
)
[1] => Array
(
[0] => "ok3"
[1] => "ok4"
)
[2] => Array
(
[0] => "ok5"
[1] => "ok6"
[2] => "ok99"
)
)