Question

I have a standard array with key-value pairs – and I want to use the keys to transform it into a multi-dimensional array. The difficulty seems to be that I need to loop recursively the unknown number of new keys and turn them into a multi-dimensional array. In short, I want this:

$val[alfa.xray.uno] = "Some value";    
=> $val['alfa']['xray']['uno'] = "Some value";    

Example:
(The code fails and also needs to handle N dimensions – but you get the idea..)

$arr['alfa.xray.uno'] = "Alfa X-Ray Uno";
$arr['alfa.yaho.duo'] = "Alfa Yaho Duo";
$arr['beta.xray.uno'] = "Beta X-Ray Uno";
$arr['beta.xray.duo'] = "Beta X-Ray Duo";
$arr['just-me'] = "Root-level item";

print_r( array_flat_to_multidimensional($arr) );

function array_flat_to_multidimensional($arr) {
    foreach($arr as $key=>$val) {
        $key = explode(".",$key);
        for($i=0; $i<count($key); $i++) {
            if($i==0) { $out[$key[$i]] = $val; }
            else if($i==1) { $out[$key[$i-1]][$key[$i]] = $val; }
            else if($i==2) { $out[$key[$i-2]][$key[$i-1]][$key[$i]] = $val; }
            else if($i==3) { $out[$key[$i-3]][$key[$i-2]][$key[$i-1]][$key[$i]] = $val; }
        }
    }
    return $out;
}

Perhaps RecursiveArrayIterator will do the trick?

Answer 1

You could use references to successively iterate through and build up the nested array structure:

$out = array();
foreach ($arr as $key=>$val) {
    $r = & $out;
    foreach (explode(".", $key) as $key) {
        if (!isset($r[$key])) {
            $r[$key] = array();
        }
        $r = & $r[$key];
    }
    $r = $val;
}
return $out;