Question

I am getting started with php, and I was wondering if it was possible to explode a string into an array with named variables. The set up is that I have some data I am reading in from a text file, and I want to break it up into rows first and then break it up into individual pieces of data.

 Data1  |  Data2  |  Data3  |
 ----------------------------
|   x   |    y    |    z    |
|   p   |    q    |    r    |

So I am trying to end up with something like:

data {
   row1 {
       data1: x
       data2: y
       data3: z
   row2 {
       data1: p
       data2: q
       data3: r
   }
}

and I would like be able to access the data using the names of the variables if possible:

$r1d1 = data[row1]['data1'];

Answer 1

If you want to explode a string into an associative array, you can use the list function.

// Initialize data_list
$data_list = array();

// Remove delimiter at start and end of string
$string = trim('|   x   |    y    |    z    |', '|');

$data = array();
list($data['data1'],$data['data2'],$data['data3']) = explode('|',$string);

$data_list[] = $data;

You would want to have it wrapped into a foreach loop to process each line of the file. In the end the $data_list would contain all the data.