How to format var_export to php5.4 array syntax - php

Question

There are lots of questions and answers around the subject of valid php syntax from var outputs, what I am looking for is a quick and clean way of getting the output of var_export to use valid php5.4 array syntax.
Given
$arr = [
'key' => 'value',
'mushroom' => [
'badger' => 1
]
];
var_export($arr);
outputs
array (
'key' => 'value',
'mushroom' =>
array (
'badger' => 1,
),
)
Is there any quick and easy way to have it output the array as defined, using square bracket syntax?
[
'key' => 'value',
'mushroom' => [
'badger' => 1
]
]
Is the general consensus to use regex parsing? If so, has anyone come across a decent regular expression? The value level contents of the arrays I will use will all be scalar and array, no objects or classes.

Answer 1

I had something similar laying around.
function var_export54($var, $indent="") {
switch (gettype($var)) {
case "string":
return '"' . addcslashes($var, "\\\$\"\r\n\t\v\f") . '"';
case "array":
$indexed = array_keys($var) === range(0, count($var) - 1);
$r = [];
foreach ($var as $key => $value) {
$r[] = "$indent "
. ($indexed ? "" : var_export54($key) . " => ")
. var_export54($value, "$indent ");
}
return "[\n" . implode(",\n", $r) . "\n" . $indent . "]";
case "boolean":
return $var ? "TRUE" : "FALSE";
default:
return var_export($var, TRUE);
}
}
It's not overly pretty, but maybe sufficient for your case.
Any but the specified types are handled by the regular var_export. Thus for single-quoted strings, just comment out the string case.

Answer 2

For anyone looking for a more modern-day solution, use the Symfony var-exporter, also available as a standalone library on composer, but included in Symfony by default.
composer require symfony/var-exporter
use Symfony\Component\VarExporter\VarExporter;
// ...
echo VarExporter::export($arr)

Answer 3

I realize this question is ancient; but search leads me here. I didn't care for full iterations or using json_decode, so here's a preg_replace-based var_export twister that gets the job done.
function var_export_short($data, $return=true)
{
$dump = var_export($data, true);
$dump = preg_replace('#(?:\A|\n)([ ]*)array \(#i', '[', $dump); // Starts
$dump = preg_replace('#\n([ ]*)\),#', "\n$1],", $dump); // Ends
$dump = preg_replace('#=> \[\n\s+\],\n#', "=> [],\n", $dump); // Empties
if (gettype($data) == 'object') { // Deal with object states
$dump = str_replace('__set_state(array(', '__set_state([', $dump);
$dump = preg_replace('#\)\)$#', "])", $dump);
} else {
$dump = preg_replace('#\)$#', "]", $dump);
}
if ($return===true) {
return $dump;
} else {
echo $dump;
}
}
I've tested it on several arrays and objects. Not exhaustively by any measure, but it seems to be working fine. I've made the output "tight" by also compacting extra line-breaks and empty arrays. If you run into any inadvertent data corruption using this, please let me know. I haven't benchmarked this against the above solutions yet, but I suspect it'll be a good deal faster. Enjoy reading your arrays!

Answer 4

With https://github.com/zendframework/zend-code :
<?php
use Zend\Code\Generator\ValueGenerator;
$generator = new ValueGenerator($myArray, ValueGenerator::TYPE_ARRAY_SHORT);
$generator->setIndentation(' '); // 2 spaces
echo $generator->generate();

Answer 5

As the comments have pointed out, this is just an additional syntax. To get the var_export back to the bracket style str_replace works well if there are no ) in the key or value. It is still simple though using JSON as an intermediate:
$output = json_decode(str_replace(array('(',')'), array('&#40','&#41'), json_encode($arr)), true);
$output = var_export($output, true);
$output = str_replace(array('array (',')','&#40','&#41'), array('[',']','(',')'), $output);
I used the HTML entities for ( and ). You can use the escape sequence or whatever.