Question

I have a string that looks like this:

[2005]
one 
two
three
[2004]
six

What would be the smoothest was to get an array from it that would look like this:

array(
    ['2005'] => "one \n two \n three",
    ['2005'] => "six",
)

… or maybe even get the inner array sliced into lines array…

I tried doing it with preg_split, which worked but didn’t give associative array keys so I didn’t have the year numbers as keys.

Is there any cool way of doing this without iterating through all the lines ?

Answer 1

/(\[[0-9]{4}\])([^\[]*)/ will give you the date and whatever is after until the next one.

Use the groups to create your array: With preg_match_all() you get a $matches array where $matches[1] is the date and $matches[2] is the data following it.