Filtering Soundcloud Tags with PHP

Question

Soundcloud's API returns a string of tags for each track like so:

Pop Rock "Soft Pop" "Soft Rock" "Easy Listening" Jazz

where the string contains a list of tags seperated by spaces. Multiword tags are quoted in doublequotes.

At first, I was using something like

$tracktags = 'Pop Rock "Soft Pop" "Soft Rock" "Easy Listening" Jazz';
if(strpos($tracktags, "Soft Rock") !== false) {
    //we found a match
}

To find all songs that are Soft Rock.

This becomes cumbersome when I am trying to narrow down tracks that include this 1 term when some of these terms include words being used in other tags.

So, for example if that tag I was looking for was Pop, using this method I get songs that are tagged Soft Pop, Country Pop, Pop ballads, and so on, because using strpos() just finds that part of the string . That's not the result I am hoping for; in this instance I just want to get songs that are tagged Pop.

I am thinking I need to separate this string into an array and then cycle through the array to make sure each value is implicitly identical to the tag I am searching for... but I'm not sure how I would do that. I guess split() by the quotations, then split() the remaining by spaces?

Is there a PHP function that can compare both the string and length of the string, I guess, to ensure it is identical to my searching term?

Answer 1

Try splitting into an array using str_getcsv() with a space as the delimiter. It will use the quotes as enclosures by default and will ignore the space inside the quotes. Then just use in_array():

$tracktags = str_getcsv($tracktags, ' ');

if(in_array('Pop', $tracktags)) {
    //we found a match
}   

To see what's there:

print_r($tracktags);