Question

Anyone got any idea on how to deal with explode to miss elements if there nesting inside something? Examples below.

So i have a data structure like so…

 {1,2,3,{4,2},5,6}

I am trying to convert that into a php array like so…

 array( 1, 2, 3, array( 4, 2 ), 5, 6);

Any ideas on how that might work? Some suggestions have been Regex or explode while monitoring a state machine? ( but i have no idea on how they work :S )

Answer 1

You can try

$string  =  "{1,2,{3,2},4,5}" ;
var_dump(__array($string));

$string  =  "[1,2,3,[4,2],5]" ;
var_dump(__array($string));

$string  =  "(1,2,(3,2),4,5)" ;
var_dump(__array($string,array("(",")")));

$string  =  "+1,2,+3,2-,4,5-" ;
var_dump(__array($string,array("+","-")));


function __array($string,$seperator = array("{","}"))
{
    $string  = str_replace($seperator, array("[","]"), $string);
    return json_decode($string);
}

Output

array
  0 => int 1
  1 => int 2
  2 => 
    array
      0 => int 3
      1 => int 2
  3 => int 4
  4 => int 5