Question

I have a string that looks like:

KEY1,"Value"KEY2,"Value"Key3,"Value"

This string will always vary in the number of keys/values i need an associative array:

array (
    'KEY1' => 'Value',
    'KEY2' => 'Value',
    'KEY3' => 'Value'
);

of the data contained in the string, a regular expression would be best I suppose?

Answer 1

Assuming your values don’t contain a " in them you can do:

$str    = 'KEY1,"Value1"KEY2,"Value2"Key3,"Value3"';
$pieces = preg_split('/(?<=[^,]")/',$str,-1,PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
$result = array();

foreach($pieces as $piece) {
        list($k,$v) = explode(",",trim$piece);
        $result[$k] = trim($v,'"');
}

See it in action!