Parse text and populate associative array from two substrings per line - php

Question

Given a large string of text, I want to search for the following patterns:
#key: value
So an example is:
some crazy text
more nonesense
#first: first-value;
yet even more non-sense
#second: second-value;
finally more non-sense
The output should be:
array("first" => "first-value", "second" => "second-value");

Answer 1

<?php
$string = 'some crazy text
more nonesense
#first: first-value;
yet even more non-sense
#second: second-value;
finally more non-sense';
preg_match_all('##(.*?): (.*?);#is', $string, $matches);
$count = count($matches[0]);
for($i = 0; $i < $count; $i++)
{
$return[$matches[1][$i]] = $matches[2][$i];
}
print_r($return);
?>
Link http://ideone.com/fki3U
Array (
[first] => first-value
[second] => second-value )

Answer 2

Tested in PHP 5.3:
// set-up test string and final array
$myString = "#test1: test1;#test2: test2;";
$myArr = array();
// do the matching
preg_match_all('/#([^\:]+)\:([^;]+);/', $myString, $matches);
// put elements of $matches in array here
$actualMatches = count($matches) - 1;
for ($i=0; $i<$actualMatches; $i++) {
$myArr[$matches[1][$i]] = $matches[2][$i];
}
print_r($myArr);
The reasoning behind this is this:
The regex is creating two capture groups. One capture group is the key, the
other the data for that key. The capture groups are the portions of the regex
inside left and right bananas, i.e., (...).
$actualMatches just adjusts for the fact that preg_match_all returns an
extra element containing all matches lumped together.
Demo.

Answer 3

Match whole qualifying lines starting with # and ending with ;.
Capture the substring that does not contain any colons as the first group and capture the substring between the space after the colon and the semicolon at the end of the line.
By using the any character dot in the second capture group, the substring may contain a semicolon without damaging any extracted data.
Call array_combine() to form key-value relationships between the two capture groups.
Code: (Demo)
preg_match_all(
'/^#([^:]+): (.+);$/m',
$text,
$m
);
var_export(array_combine($m[1], $m[2]));
Output:
array (
'first' => 'first-value',
'second' => 'second-value',
)

Answer 4

You can try looping the string line by line (explode and foreach) and check if the line starts with an # (substr) if it has, explode the line by :.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.explode.php
http://nl.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.foreach.php
http://nl.php.net/manual/en/function.substr.php

Answer 5

Depending on what your input string looks like, you might be able to simply use parse_ini_string, or make some small changes to the string then use the function.