PHP/Laravel - find and read 'key-value pair' from file

Question

I want to store some text informations but I don't want to use database for this. For example there is a file:

key1: some text information 1
key2: some text information 2
key3: another text information

I was wondering, what is the shortest way to find one specific value form this file using PHP or Laravel?

I could use foreach(file('yourfile.txt') as $line) {} loop to store text lines into array and then find the line with specific key, but maybe there is shorter or nicer way to do this.

Answer 1

If all lines are in the same format ([key]: [value]) you can simply use explode(": ", $line) to get the values, and then rewrite them to a PHP array;

// getData('yourfile.txt') returns an associative array
function getData($file) {
    $data = file($file);
    $returnArray = array()
    foreach($data as $line) {
        $explode = explode(": ", $line);
        $returnArray[$explode[0]] = $explode[1];
    }

    return $returnArray;
}