Question

I have string in my database like

Label is {input:inputvalue} and date is {date:2013-2-2}

How can I extract input and inputvalue from the first brace, and date and 2013-2-3 from the second brace and so on? So that displays like

Label is <input name="input" value="input_value"> and date is <input name="date" value="2013-2-2"> 

Below function works only if the string has {input} or {date}

function Replace_brackets($rec){
    $arr = array(" <input name="input" value='input'> ",
                 " <input name="date" value='date'> ");
    $arr1 = array('{input}','{date}');
    $itemvalue=str_replace($arr1,$arr,$rec);
    return $itemvalue;
}

There might be more or less braces on the text such as 2 input braces and 4 date braces.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

preg_replace() with back references will work in this case http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php:

<?php
$s = "Label is {input:inputvalue} and date is {date:2013-2-2}";
print preg_replace( "/{([^:}]*):?([^}]*)}/", "<input name='\\1' value='\\2'>", $s );
?>

Or if you need to parse the name and value pairs, as @Jack pointed out, you could use the preg_replace_callback() version (you don’t actually need to use htmlspecialchars() on the attribute values though. Replace htmlspecialchars() with whatever parsing function is applicable):

print preg_replace_callback( "/{([^:}]*):?([^}]*)}/", "generate_html", $s );

function generate_html( Array $match )
{
return "<input name='".htmlspecialchars($match[1])."'    value='".htmlspecialchars($match[2])."'>";
}