turning this trainwreck of a function into a recursive one - php

Question

I've been trying to build this recursive function for the better part of a day now, but I just can't seem to get it to work the way I want.
First, I have a property which holds some data that the function have to access:
$this->data
And then I have this string which the intention is to turn into a relative path:
$path = 'path.to.%id%-%folder%.containing.%info%';
The part of the string that are like this: %value% will load some dynamic values found in the $this->data property (like so: $this->data['id']; or $this->data['folder'];
and to make things really interesting, the property can reference itself again like so: $this->data['folder'] = 'foldername.%subfolder%'; and also have two %values% separated by a - that would have to be left alone.
So to the problem, I've been trying to make a recursive function that will load the dynamic values from the data property, and then again if the new value contains another %value% and so on until no more %value%'s are loaded.
So far, this is what I've been able to come up with:
public function recursiveFolder( $folder, $pathArr = null )
{
$newPathArr = explode( '.', $folder );
if ( count ( $newPathArr ) !== 1 )
{
foreach( $newPathArr as $id => $folder )
{
$value = $this->recursiveFolder( $folder, $newPathArr );
$resultArr = explode( '.', $value );
if ( count ( $resultArr ) !== 1 )
{
foreach ( $resultArr as $nid => $result )
{
$nvalue = $this->recursiveFolder( $result, $newPathArr );
$resultArr[$nid] = $nvalue;
}
}
$resultArr = implode( '.',$resultArr );
$newPathArr[$id] = $resultArr;
}
}
else
{
$pattern = '/%(.*?)%/si';
preg_match_all( $pattern, $folder, $matches );
if ( empty( $matches[0] ) )
{
return $folder;
}
foreach ( $matches[1] as $mid => $match )
{
if ( isset( $this->data[$match] ) && $this->data[$match] != '' )
{
$folder = str_replace( $matches[0][$mid], $this->data[$match], $folder );
return $folder;
}
}
}
return $newPathArr;
}
Unfortunately it is not a recursive function at all as it grinds to a halt when it has multiple layers of %values%, but works with two layers -barely-. (I just coded it so that it would work at a bare minimalistic level this point).
Here's how it should work:
It should turn:
'files.%folder%.blog-%type%.and.%time%'
into:
'files.foldername.blog-post.and.2013.feb-12th.09'
based on this:
$data['folder'] = 'foldername';
$data['type'] = 'post';
$data['time'] = '%year%.%month%-%day%';
$data['year'] = 2013;
$data['month'] = 'feb';
$data['day'] = '12th.%hour%';
$data['hour'] = '09';
Hope you can help!
Jay

Answer 1

I don't see the need for this too be solved recursively:
<?php
function putData($str, $data)
{
// Repeat the replacing process until no more matches are found:
while (preg_match("/%(.*?)%/si", $str, $matches))
{
// Use $matches to make your replaces
}
return $str;
}
?>