Question

I have this string

$s = 'Yo be [diggin = array("fruit"=> "apple")] scriptzors!';

which then gets checked by

$matches = null;
preg_match_all('/\[(.*?)\]/', $s, $matches);
var_dump($matches[1]);

but what I want it to do is the following, it should return the following

print "yo be";
$this->diggin(SEND ARRAY HERE);
print "scriptzors!";

EDIT to show issue with below answer

$s = 'Yo be [diggin = array("fruit"=>"apple")] scriptzors!';
$matches = null; 
preg_match_all('/\[(.*?)\]/', $s, $matches);

$var = explode(' = ', $matches[1]);
print $var[0]; //THIS DOES NOT PRINT

Answer 1

You’re sort of close. You can explode the string with = but with spaces included around the =. Then the first element would be the function name, in this case diggin and the second element would be the array but as a string. You’ll need to eval that one so that it’ll be a proper array data type.

$var = explode(' = ', $matches[1][0]);
call_user_func_array(array($this, $var[0]), eval($var[1] . ';'));
// or do 
$this->{var[0]}(eval($val[1] . ';'));

As an alternative, you can also modify the regex so that you don’t have to call explode.

preg_match_all('/\[([a-z0-9_]*)\s*?=\s*(.*)\]/i', $s, $matches);

Either way, you’ll want to make sure that you sanitize the user input because eval can be evil.