Broke string into vars with variable position

Question

I need to broke a string into some vars but its order is not fixed as the exemple:

$string = "name='John';phone='555-5555';city='oakland';";
$string2 = "city='oakland';phone='555-5555';name='John';";
$string3 = "phone='555-5555';name='John';city='oakland';";

so I need to broke the strings into:

$name
$phone
$city

if the position would be fixed i could use explode and call for the array key that i need like

$brokenString = explode("'",$string);

$name = $brokenString[1];
$phone = $brokenString[3];
$city = $brokenString[5];

however how could I do it with variable position??

Answer 1

One way to do it with sort to make the position same always for all string variables.

<?php
$string = "name='John';phone='555-5555';city='oakland';";
$string2 = "city='oakland';phone='555-5555';name='John';";
$string3 = "phone='555-5555';name='John';city='oakland';";
$array = explode(';',$string3);
sort($array);
$array = array_filter($array); # remove the empty element
foreach($array as $value){
    $split = explode('=',$value);
    $result[$split[0]] = $split[1]; 
}
extract($result); # extract result as php variables
echo "\$city = $city; \$name = $name; \$phone = $phone";
?>

EDIT: As using extract() is generally not a good idea.You can use simple foreach() instead of extract(),

foreach($result as $k => $v) {
  $$k = $v;
}

WORKING DEMO: https://3v4l.org/RB8pT