Question

I’d like to explode a multi-line-string like this

color:red
material:metal

to an array like this

$array['color']=red
$array['material']=metal

any idea?

Answer 1

Use explode(), you can use a regexp for it, but it’s simple enough without the overhead.

$data = array();
foreach (explode("\n", $dataString) as $cLine) {
    list ($cKey, $cValue) = explode(':', $cLine, 2);
    $data[$cKey] = $cValue;
}

As mentioned in comments, if data is coming from a Windows/DOS environment it may well have CRLF newlines, adding the following line before the foreach() would resolve that.

$dataString = str_replace("\r", "", $dataString); // remove possible \r characters

The alternative with regexp can be quite pleasant using preg_match_all() and array_combine():

$matches = array();
preg_match_all('/^(.+?):(.+)$/m', $dataString, $matches);
$data = array_combine($matches[1], $matches[2]);