Turn text inside brackets to an array PHP - php

Question

If I have a string that looks like this:
$myString = "[sometext][moretext][993][112]This is a long text";
I want it to be turned into:
$string = "This is a long text";
$arrayDigits[0] = 993;
$arrayDigits[1] = 112;
$arrayText[0] = "sometext";
$arrayText[1] = "moretext";
How can I do this with PHP?
I understand Regular Expressions is the solution. Please notice that $myString was just an example. There can be several brackets, not just two of each, as in my example.
Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

This is what I came up with.
<?php
#For better display
header("Content-Type: text/plain");
#The String
$myString = "[sometext][moretext][993][112]This is a long text";
#Initialize the array
$matches = array();
#Fill it with matches. It would populate $matches[1].
preg_match_all("|\[(.+?)\]|", $myString, $matches);
#Remove anything inside of square brackets, and assign to $string.
$string = preg_replace("|\[.+\]|", "", $myString);
#Display the results.
print_r($matches[1]);
print_r($string);
After that, you can iterate over the $matches array and check each value to assign it to a new array.

Answer 2

Try this:
$s = '[sometext][moretext][993][112]This is a long text';
preg_match_all('/\[(\w+)\]/', $s, $m);
$m[1] will contain all texts in the brakets, after this you could check type of each value. Also, you could check this using two preg_match_all: at first time with pattern /\[(\d+)\]/ (will return array of digits), in the second - pattern /\[([a-zA-z]+)\]/ (that will return words):
$s = '[sometext][moretext][993][112]This is a long text';
preg_match_all('/\[(\d+)\]/', $s, $matches);
$arrayOfDigits = $matches[1];
preg_match_all('/\[([a-zA-Z]+)\]/', $s, $matches);
$arrayOfWords = $matches[1];

Answer 3

For cases like yours you can make use of named subpatterns so to "tokenize" your string. With some little code, this can be made easily configurable with an array of tokens:
$subject = "[sometext][moretext][993][112]This is a long text";
$groups = array(
'digit' => '\[\d+]',
'text' => '\[\w+]',
'free' => '.+'
);
Each group contains the subpattern and it's name. They match in their order, so if the group digit matches, it won't give text a chance (which is necessary here because \d+ is a subset of \w+). This array can then turned into a full pattern:
foreach($groups as $name => &$subpattern)
$subpattern = sprintf('(?<%s>%s)', $name, $subpattern);
unset($subpattern);
$pattern = sprintf('/(?:%s)/', implode('|', $groups));
The pattern looks like this:
/(?:(?<digit>\[\d+])|(?<text>\[\w+])|(?<free>.+))/
Everything left to do is to execute it against your string, capture the matches and filter them for some normalized output:
if (preg_match_all($pattern, $subject, $matches))
{
$matches = array_intersect_key($matches, $groups);
$matches = array_map('array_filter', $matches);
$matches = array_map('array_values', $matches);
print_r($matches);
}
The matches are now nicely accessible in an array:
Array
(
[digit] => Array
(
[0] => [993]
[1] => [112]
)
[text] => Array
(
[0] => [sometext]
[1] => [moretext]
)
[free] => Array
(
[0] => This is a long text
)
)
The full example at once:
$subject = "[sometext][moretext][993][112]This is a long text";
$groups = array(
'digit' => '\[\d+]',
'text' => '\[\w+]',
'free' => '.+'
);
foreach($groups as $name => &$subpattern)
$subpattern = sprintf('(?<%s>%s)', $name, $subpattern);
unset($subpattern);
$pattern = sprintf('/(?:%s)/', implode('|', $groups));
if (preg_match_all($pattern, $subject, $matches))
{
$matches = array_intersect_key($matches, $groups);
$matches = array_map('array_filter', $matches);
$matches = array_map('array_values', $matches);
print_r($matches);
}

Answer 4

You could try something along the lines of:
<?php
function parseString($string) {
// identify data in brackets
static $pattern = '#(?:\[)([^\[\]]+)(?:\])#';
// result container
$t = array(
'string' => null,
'digits' => array(),
'text' => array(),
);
$t['string'] = preg_replace_callback($pattern, function($m) use(&$t) {
// shove matched string into digits/text groups
$t[is_numeric($m[1]) ? 'digits' : 'text'][] = $m[1];
// remove the brackets from the text
return '';
}, $string);
return $t;
}
$string = "[sometext][moretext][993][112]This is a long text";
$result = parseString($string);
var_dump($result);
/*
$result === array(
"string" => "This is a long text",
"digits" => array(
993,
112,
),
"text" => array(
"sometext",
"moretext",
),
);
*/
(PHP5.3 - using closures)