Reading array-like values from .INI file into PHP array? Example inside - php

Question

I searched similar questions but found nothing quite did what I want.
I have a large INI file which contains basic key/value pairs on each line. Lots of the keys are basically "arrays" stored in .INI format as you'll see in the excerpt below:
# Excerpt from INI file itself...
CountryFlagsPackage=CountryFlags
bAllowBinds=False
bShowTime=False
Records[0]=14.64
Records[1]=16.33
Records[2]=11.47
Records[3]=13.26
Records[4]=16.64
Records[5]=19.34
I'm using parse_ini_string() to put the INI into an array which results in this:
# Excerpt from print_r() after parse_ini_string()
[CountryFlagsPackage] => CountryFlags
[bAllowBinds] => False
[bShowTime] => False
[Records[0]] => 14.64
[Records[1]] => 16.33
[Records[2]] => 11.47
[Records[3]] => 13.26
[Records[4]] => 16.64
[Records[5]] => 19.34
My question is: is there an elegant way to group all those "Records" entries into one PHP array? Currently - as you see above - they're just individual array items. Basically, I'm looking for the above array to become multi-dimensional.
I could use array_keys() and look for the text "Records" but that's not very elegant or re-usable.
Edit: I suppose I could use a regex to look for anything with square brackets at the end, too. Any better solutions?

Answer 1

I doubt there's a native way to do this, so here's what I did:
$file = parse_ini_string($ini);
foreach ($file as $key => $value) {
if (preg_match("/(\w+)\[\d+]/", $key, $matches)) {
// "Array" style key/value
$arrays[$matches[1]][] = $value;
} else {
// Standard key/value pair
$arrays[$key] = $value;
}
}
print_r($arrays);
Results in:
Array
(
[CountryFlagsPackage] => CountryFlags
[bAllowBinds] => False
[bShowTime] => False
[Records] => Array
(
[0] => 14.64
[1] => 16.33
[2] => 11.47
[3] => 13.26
[4] => 16.64
[5] => 19.34
)
)