Question

I’ve been trying to combine 3 strings into one and having trouble doing so.

the strings are below.

$from="/2/3/4/5/6/";
$to="/30/31/32/33/34/";
$sub="/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10/11/12/";#this is dynamic, ever changing past > (/2/3/4/5/6/)

the output must look like this below.

$output="/30/31/32/33/34/6/7/8/9/10/11/12/";

else if $sub changes like below then.

$from="/2/3/4/5/6/";
$to="/30/31/32/33/34/";
$sub="/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/";
$output="/30/31/32/33/34/6/7/8/";

and else if $to changes then this.

$from="/2/3/4/5/6/";
$to="/30/31/";
$sub="/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/";
$output="/30/31/6/7/8/";

the $to needs to be first, then the $sub at the end, minus the $from before the end /*/(eg./6/) to be combined into 1 string.

how is this possible?

Answer 1

You are basically storing array structures serialized inside strings. Clever Exploding should help:

$output = $to
  . implode('/', array_diff(
      explode('/', $sub),
      array_slice(explode('/', $from), 0, -2)
    )) . '/';

An alternative could be regular expressions