Question

For a project I’m working on, I have a base URI with placeholders and I want to generate all the possible combinations from an array of possible values for each placeholder using PHP.

More concretely:

$uri = "foo/bar?foo=%foo%&bar=%bar%";

$placeholders = array(
  '%foo%' => array('a', 'b'),
  '%bar%' => array('c', 'd'),
  // ...
);

I’d like ending up having the following array:

array(4) {
  [0]=>
  string(23) "foo/bar?foo=a&bar=c"
  [1]=>
  string(23) "foo/bar?foo=a&bar=d"
  [2]=>
  string(19) "foo/bar?foo=b&bar=c"
  [3]=>
  string(19) "foo/bar?foo=b&bar=d"
}

Not to mention I should be able to add more placeholders to generate more computed URIs, of course, so the solution should work recursively.

I might be overtired these days, but I’m getting stuck at achieving this simply, and I’m sure there’s a simple way, perhaps even with built-in PHP functions…

Answer 1

$uri= "foo/bar?foo=%foo%&bar=%bar%&baz=%baz%";
$placeholders = array(
    '%foo%' => array('a', 'b'),
    '%bar%' => array('c', 'd', 'e'),
    '%baz%' => array('f', 'g')
    );

//adds a level of depth in the combinations for each new array of values
function expandCombinations($combinations, $values)
{
    $results = array();
    $i=0;
    //combine each existing combination with all the new values
    foreach($combinations as $combination) {
        foreach($values as $value) {
            $results[$i] = is_array($combination) ? $combination : array($combination);
            $results[$i][] = $value;
            $i++;
        }
    }
    return $results;
}   

//generate the combinations
$patterns = array();
foreach($placeholders as $pattern => $values)
{
    $patterns[] = $pattern;
    $combinations = isset($combinations) ? expandCombinations($combinations, $values) : $values;
}

//generate the uris for each combination
foreach($combinations as $combination)
{
    echo str_replace($patterns, $combination, $uri),"\n";
}

The idea here is to list in an array all the possible combinations for the replacements. The function expandCombinations just adds one level of depth in the combinations for each new pattern to replace with no recursion (we know how PHP loves recursion). This should allow for a decent number of patterns to replace without recursing at an insane depth.