Question

I have a bunch of strings like “memory.caching” and “server.base.url”. Within my configuration object each part of the key “.” is equal to a key within an array, the value could be another array and the last would be the value so “memory.caching” would equate to.

$config = array(
  "memory" => array(
    "caching" => true
  )
);

I want to create a setter method. I have ended up with the below code, but that won’t work for three or four levels of depth. How can I do it without adding multiple else/if clauses.

public function set($k, $v) {
  $parts = explode(".", $k);

  // Start sucky code.
  if (count($parts) == 2)
  {
    $this->config[$parts[0]][$parts[1]] = $val;
  }
}

I was thinking some form of loop with assigning by reference like below, but I couldn’t get it to work.

public function set($k, $v) {
  $parts = explode(".", $k);

  $tmp = $this->config;
  foreach ($parts as $p) {
    $tmp &= $tmp[$p];
  }

  $tmp = $v;
}

Any ideas on how I could achieve this?

Answer 1

To set a value…

public function set($path, $value, $delimiter = '.') {

    $tokens = explode($delimiter, $path);

    $currentPiece = &$this->config;

    foreach($tokens as $token) {
       $currentPiece = &$currentPiece[$token];
    }

    $currentPiece = $value;  

}

CodePad.

To get a value…

public function get($path, $delimiter = '.') {

    $tokens = explode($delimiter, $path);

    $currentPiece = $this->config;

    while ($token = array_shift($tokens)) {
        $currentPiece = $currentPiece[$token];
    }

    return $currentPiece;

}

CodePad.