Question

I have an array to store the configuration like this

$config = array (
            'db' => array(
                'db1' => array(
                    'dbname' => 'mydatabase', 
                    'user' => 'myusername', 
                    'pass' => 'mypassword', 
                    'host' => 'myhost'
                )
            ),
            'url' => array(
                'homeUrl' => 'http://www.example.com'
            )
         )

And I’m writing a function to retrieve the data from the array by passing in a string like db.db1.dbname and it supposes to give me 'mydatabase'

I tried to explode the string into an array in order to get the keys, db, db1, and dbname. but after that, I got kinda stuck on how exactly I’m supposed to use them like $config -> db -> db1 -> dbname or $config['db']['db1']['dbname'] in order to get 'mydatabase'.

Ideally, say I have the function named read($arg, $array), and I would like to retrieve results like this

read('db.db1.dbname', $config), returns 'mydatabase'
read('url.homeUrl', $config), returns 'http://www.example.com'

Since I don’t know how many keys are contained in the string, I need this to be more dynamic.
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I’m really wondering why you would want to do this, but here it goes:

function read($item, $config)
{
    $selectors = explode('.', $item);

    $configItem = $config;
    foreach($selectors as $selector) {
        $configItem = $configItem[$selector];
    }

    return $configItem;
}

$config = array (
    'db' => array(
        'db1' => array(
            'dbname' => 'mydatabase', 
            'user' => 'myusername', 
            'pass' => 'mypassword', 
            'host' => 'myhost',
        ),
    ),
    'url' => array(
        'homeUrl' => 'http://www.example.com',
    ),
);

read('db.db1.dbname', $config); // will return mydatabase

Note that you would have to check whether the keys exists and throw an error or exception if that’s not the case.

Instead of using the function is there a reason why you cannot do:

function functionThatNeedsDatabaseInfo($databaseInfo)
{
    // do database stuff
}

functionThatNeedsDatabaseInfo($config['db']['db1']);