Question

For my game I’m coding a console that sends messages via AJAX and then receives output from the server.

For example, an input would be:

/testmessage Hello!

However, I would also need to parse the quotes e.g.:

/testmessage "Hello World!"

However, since I am simply exploding the string with spaces, PHP sees "Hello and World!" as separate parameters. How do I make PHP think that “Hello World!” is one parameter?
Right now I’m using the following code to parse the command:

// Suppose $inputstring = '/testmessage "Hello World!"';
$inputstring = substr($inputstring, 1);

$parameters = explode(" ", $inputstring);

$command = strtolower($parameters[0]);

switch ($command) {
    case "testmessage":
        ConsoleDie($parameters[1]);
        break; 
}

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

This code will do what you want:

  $params = preg_split('/(".*?")/', '/testmessage "Hello World!" 1 2 3', -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY | PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
  $realParams = array();
  foreach($params as $param)
  {
     $param = trim($param);
     if ($param == '')
        continue;

     if (strpos($param, '"') === 0)
        $realParams = array_merge($realParams, array(trim($param, '"')));
     else
        $realParams = array_merge($realParams, explode(' ', $param));
  }
  unset($params);
  print_r($realParams);

that print:

array(5) {
  [0]=>
  string(12) "/testmessage"
  [1]=>
  string(14) "Hello World!"
  [2]=>
  string(1) "1"
  [3]=>
  string(1) "2"
  [4]=>
  string(1) "3"
}

Note: As you can see the first parameter is the command