Question

Is it possible to do something like this in PHP?

$index1 = "[0][1][2]";
$index2 = "['cat']['cow']['dog']";

// I want this to be $myArray[0][1][2]
$myArray{$index1} = 'stuff';

// I want this to be $myArray['cat']['cow']['dog']
$myArray{$index2} = 'morestuff';

I’ve searched for a solution, but I don’t think I know the keywords involved in figuring this out.

Answer 1

Not directly. $myArray[$index] would evaluate to $myArray['[0][1][2]']. You would probably have to separate each dimension or write a little function to interpret the string:

function strIndexArray($arr, $indices, $offset = 0) {
     $lb = strpos($indices, '[', $offset);
     if ($lb === -1) {
         return $arr[$indices];
     }
     else {
         $rb = strpos($indices,']', $lb);
         $index = substr($indices, $lb, $rb - $lb);
         return strIndexArray($arr[$index], substr($indices, $rb+1));
     }
}

You can probably find some regular expression to more easily extract the indices which would lead to something like:

$indices = /*regex*/;
$value = '';
foreach($indices as $index) {
    $value = $array[$index];
}

To set a value in the array the following function could be used:

function setValue(&$arr, $indices, $value) {
    $lb = strpos($indices, '[');
    if ($lb === -1) {
        $arr = $value;
    }
    else {
        $rb = strpos($indices, ']', $lb);
        $index = substr($indices, $lb, $rb);
        setValue($arr[$index], substr($indices, $lb, $rb+1), $value);
    }
}

Note: I made above code in the answer editor so it may contain a typo or two ; )