Line and colon separated list to array PHP - php

Question

I'm trying to work out a simple way to take a list, like this
foo: Alpha
bar: Bravo
fooBar: Charlie
And turn this into an associative array so that values would be
$array['foo'] //would contain Alpha
$array['bar'] //would contain Bravo
etc.
What is the cleanest way to achieve this ?

Answer 1

You can do it manually if your first list is already in an array:
$array = [];
$list = ['foo: Alpha', 'bar: Bravo'];
foreach ($list as $element) {
$parts = explode(': ', $element);
$array[$parts[0]] = $parts[1];
}
Otherwise, simply use parse_ini_string to parse a string that contains your data into an associative array (note that this function requires PHP 5.3 or greater).
If your data is in a string, and you don't have PHP 5.3, you can split on new lines to get an array: $list = explode("\n", $string);.

Answer 2

Something like this?:
$string = "foo: Alpha
bar: Bravo
fooBar: Charlie";
$array = array();
$lines = explode("\n", $string);
foreach ($lines as $line) {
list($key, $value) = explode(": ", $line);
$array[$key] = $value;
}
var_dump($array);
Result:
array(3) {
["foo"]=>
string(6) "Alpha
"
["bar"]=>
string(6) "Bravo
"
["fooBar"]=>
string(7) "Charlie"
}

Answer 3

Maybe this is overkill but if your file format is likely to expand, it's worth looking into YAML, your example happens to be valid YAML markup. So you could for example use the Symfony YAML component
use Symfony\Component\Yaml\Yaml;
$array = Yaml::parse('/path/to/file.yml');
It works with your current format and if you decide to add nested arrays or other non-trivial data, just use the YAML syntax, which is quite intuitive. Here is an introduction to the format:
http://symfony.com/doc/2.0/components/yaml/yaml_format.html

Answer 4

Try this :
$array = array();
$str = 'foo: Alpha';
$res = explode(":",$str);
$array[$res[0]] = $res[0];