PHP Url string to array - php

Question

I'm trying to find out if there's any function that would split a string like:
keyword=flower|type=outdoors|colour=red
to array:
array('keyword' => 'flower', 'type' => 'outdoors', 'colour' => 'red')
At the moment I built a custom function, which uses explode to first split elements with the separator | and then each of those with assignment symbol =, but is there perhaps a native function which would do it out of the box by specifying the string separator?
The function I've written looks like this:
public static function splitStringToArray(
$string = null,
$itemDivider = '|',
$keyValueDivider = '='
) {
if (empty($string)) {
return array();
}
$items = explode($itemDivider, $string);
if (empty($items)) {
return array();
}
$out = array();
foreach($items as $item) {
$itemArray = explode($keyValueDivider, $item);
if (
count($itemArray) > 1 &&
!empty($itemArray[1])
) {
$out[$itemArray[0]] = $itemArray[1];
}
}
return $out;
}

Answer 1

$string = "keyword=flower|type=outdoors|colour=red";
$string = str_replace('|', '&', $string);
parse_str($string, $values);
$values=array_filter($values); // Remove empty pairs as per your comment
print_r($values);
Output
Array
(
[keyword] => flower
[type] => outdoors
[colour] => red
)
Fiddle

Answer 2

Use regexp to solve this problem.
([^=]+)\=([^\|]+)
http://regex101.com/r/eQ9tW8/1

Answer 3

The issue is that your chosen format of representing variables in a string is non-standard. If you are able to change the | delimiter to a & character you would have (what looks like) a query string from a URL - and you'll be able to parse that easily:
$string = "keyword=flower&type=outdoors&colour=red";
parse_str( $string, $arr );
var_dump( $arr );
// array(3) { ["keyword"]=> string(6) "flower" ["type"]=> string(8) "outdoors" ["colour"]=> string(3) "red" }
I would recommend changing the delimiter at the source instead of manually replacing it with replace() or something similar (if possible).