Convert a structured array of strings into a nested array for PHP
It’s a long title, I agree, but I’ll try to explain simply what I wanted to do.
Let’s consider the following PHP associative array.
<?php
$data = array(
'mysql_host' => 'localhost',
'mysql_db' => 'mydatabase',
'mysql_password' => 'mypass',
'foo' => 'bar',
'some_very_long_path' => 'some data'
);
?>
I want to convert to a nested array like:
<?php
$data = array(
'mysql' => array(
'host' => 'localhost',
'db' => 'mydatabase',
'password' => 'mypass'
),
'foo' => 'bar',
'some' => array(
'very' => array(
'long' => array(
'path' => 'some data'
)
)
)
);
?>
Ideas beyond that, is to convert the array into an YAML config, but the important part is that I can’t assume how deeply nested will be the array. Here the corresponding YAML configuration file, for example purpose.
mysql:
host: localhost
db: mydatabase
password: mypass
foo: bar
some:
very:
long:
path: some data
So, here the solution that I came up, using a reference, to keep track of the positionning of the constructed array.
<?php
function postToArray ($post) {
$config = array();
foreach ($post as $key => $value) {
$reference = &$config;
$path = explode('_', $key);
for ($i=0; $i < sizeOf($path); $i++) {
if ($i == sizeOf($path)-1) {
$reference[$path[$i]] = $value;
} else {
if (!array_key_exists($path[$i], $reference)) {
$reference[$path[$i]] = array();
}
$reference = &$reference[$path[$i]];
}
}
}
return $config;
}
?>
I’ll be more than happy if someone could point me at a better solution. Hope it could help someone else than myself.
EDIT: thanks to Nicoon, for his solution on Reddit, that use a recursive function, and point out that HTTP allow this already nicely.
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