Parse an ini-formatted string to generate an associative array

Question

I have a string like below.

$str = "ENGINE=InnoDB 
        DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 
        COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci 
        COMMENT='Table comment'";

And I need to parse the key/value pairs from the string and combine them with the key/value pairs in the array below...

$arr = array(
    "ENGINE" => "InnoDB",
    "DEFAULT CHARSET" => "utf8",
    "COLLATE" => "utf8_unicode_ci",
    "COMMENT" => "'Table comment'"
);

Here the sequence of the parts of the string can be different.

Example:

$str = "ENGINE=InnoDB
        COMMENT='Table comment'
        COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci
        DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8";

Answer 1

You should use preg_match_all() and have PHP build your output from there in the format you'd like. Here's a working example in PHP. And the regex statement.

<?php
    $str = "ENGINE=InnoDB COMMENT='Table comment' COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8";
    preg_match_all("/([\w ]+)=(\w+|'(?:[^'\\\]|\\.)+')\s*/",$str,$matches,PREG_SET_ORDER);
    $out = [];
    foreach($matches as $match) {
        $out[$match[1]] = $match[2];
    }
    var_dump($out);
?>

And the result:

array(4) {
  ["ENGINE"]=>
  string(6) "InnoDB"
  ["COMMENT"]=>
  string(15) "'Table comment'"
  ["COLLATE"]=>
  string(15) "utf8_unicode_ci"
  ["DEFAULT CHARSET"]=>
  string(4) "utf8"
}

Explanation of regex

([\w ]+) // match one or more word characters (alpha+underscore+space)
= // match equals sign
  (
      \w+ // match any word character
   | // or
      ' // match one exact quote character
      (?:[^'\\]|\\.)+ // match any character including escaped quotes
      ' // match one exact quote character
   )
\s* // match any amount of whitespace until next match