php exploded associative array problem - php

Question

I have php script as below;
$ages = array("Peter"=>32, "Quagmire"=>30, "Joe"=>34);
$ages2 = '"Peter"=>32, "Quagmire"=>30, "Joe"=>34';
$array = explode(",", $ages2);
echo $array["Peter"];
echo $ages["Peter"];
In this case, echo $ages["Peter"]; is working well, but echo $array["Peter"]; is not working. Can anybody solve this please..
Thanks in advance.
blasteralfred

Answer 1

You'll have to go in two steps :
First, explode using ', ', as a separator ; to get pieces of data such as "Peter"=>32
And, then, for each value, explode using '=>' as a separator, to split the name and the age
Removing the double-quotes arround the name, of course.
For example, you could use something like this :
$result = array();
$ages2 = '"Peter"=>32, "Quagmire"=>30, "Joe"=>34';
foreach (explode(', ', $ages2) as $couple) {
list ($name, $age) = explode('=>', $couple);
$name = trim($name, '"');
$result[$name] = $age;
}
var_dump($result);
And, dumping the array, you'd get the following output :
array
'Peter' => string '32' (length=2)
'Quagmire' => string '30' (length=2)
'Joe' => string '34' (length=2)
Which means that using this :
echo $result['Peter'];
Would get you :
32

Answer 2

Of course it doesn't work. explode just splits by the given delimiter but doesn't create an associative array.

Answer 3

Your only hope if you really have such a string is to parse it manually. Either using preg_match_all, or I suppose you could do:
$array = eval('return array('.$ages2.');');
But of course this isn't recommended since it could go wrong in many many ways.
In any case I'm pretty sure you can refactor this code or give us more context if you need more help.

Answer 4

You'll need to build the array yourself by extracting the name and age:
<?php
$array = array();
$ages2 = '"Peter"=>32, "Quagmire"=>30, "Joe"=>34';
foreach (explode(",", $ages2) as $element) {
$parts = explode("=>", $element);
if (count($parts) == 2) {
$name = str_replace(array('"', ' '), '', $parts[0]);
$age = (int) $parts[1];
$array[$name] = $age;
}
}
print_r($array);

Answer 5

$ages2 is not an array, so what you're trying here won't work directly, but you can transform a string with that structure into an array like this:
$ages2 = '"Peter"=>32, "Quagmire"=>30, "Joe"=>34';
$items = explode(",", $ages2);
foreach ($items as $item) {
list($key,$value) = explode('=>',$item);
$key = str_replace('"','',trim($key)); // Remove quotes and trim whitespace.
$array[$key] = (int)$value;
}
If you var_dump($array), you'll have:
array(3) {
["Peter"]=>
int(32)
["Quagmire"]=>
int(30)
["Joe"]=>
int(34)
}
So you can do this as expected and get 32 back out:
echo $array['Peter']