Question

I’m fairly sure I’m missing something blindingly obvious here but here it goes.

I am working on updating a search function in an application which was running a loop and doing a very large number of sql queries to get object / table relations to one large query that returns everything. However the only way I could think to return relations was period separated, what I am now wanting to do is take the flat array of keys and values and convert it into an associative array to then be jsonified with json_encode.

For example what I have is this…

array(
     "ID"=>10,
     "CompanyName"=>"Some Company",
     "CompanyStatusID"=>2,
     "CompanyStatus.Status"=>"Active",
     "addressID"=>134,
     "address.postcode"=>"XXX XXXX",
     "address.street"=>"Some Street"
);

And what I want to turn it into is this…

array(
     "ID"=>10,
     "CompanyName"=>"Some Company",
     "CompanyStatusID"=>2,
     "CompanyStatus"=>array(
          "Status"=>"Active"
     ),
     "addressID"=>134,
     "address"=>array(
          "postcode"=>"XXX XXXX",
          "street"=>"Some Street"
     )
);

Now I’m sure this should be a fairly simple recursive loop but for the life of me this morning I can’t figure it out.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Regards

Graham.

Answer 1

Your function was part way there mike, though it had the problem that the top level value kept getting reset on each pass of the array so only the last period separated property made it in.

Please see updated version.

function parse_array($src) {
    $dst = array();
    foreach($src as $key => $val) {
        $parts = explode(".", $key);
        if(count($parts) > 1) {
            $index = &$dst;
            $i = 0;
            $count = count($parts)-1;
            foreach(array_slice($parts,0) as $part) {
                if($i == $count) {
                    $index[$part] = $val;
                } else {
                    if(!isset($index[$part])){
                        $index[$part] = array();
                    }
                }
                $index = &$index[$part];
                $i++;
            }
        } else {
            $dst[$parts[0]] = $val;
        }
    }
    return $dst;
}