Question

I want to store a few regular expressions in a text field in a mysql database. Currently my best idea is to use an irregular pattern of symbols for my delimiter. Example:

$delim = '!@#$%';
$regex1 = '/^(.+)$/';
$regex2 = '/.(.+)./';
$regex3 = '/(\s+):\/\//';
$string = $regex1.$delim.$regex2.$delim.$regex3;

$string would then be stored in the database. To retrieve I’d use something like:

$array = explode($delim,$string);

What I’d like to know is if there’s a better, more accurate method than just hoping my delimiter doesn’t appear in one of the regexs.

Answer 1

Yep, much better way. Use serialize() or json_encode() when putting them in the database and unserialize() or json_decode() when pulling them out.

This has the benefit of not failing in a catastrophic way which ends up taking you forever to debug.

<?php
$string = json_encode( array( $regex1, $regex2, $regex3 ) );

// Later
$array = json_decode( $string );