Question

I’ve got a Javascript file which is automatically generated from a legacy app which has a huge array defined in it (and a couple of other functions and stuff). This javascript file performs searches against content, but over time it has grown to over 2Mb, which might not sound much, but you have to download this every time you want to do a search with this particular web app. Needless to say the performance is atrocious. I want a minimal effort way of putting a wrapper around the js so that instead of calling the js on the client side, it calls my new php script which does the search on the content.

The layout of the generated JS file will be the same each time it is generated, so I could write a bunch of specific trims and splits, but then I was thinking regexp might be the way to go, but to be honest I’m not sure, so I thought I would just ask you lovely people.

Sample source:

Page[0]=new Array("Some text1","More text1","Final Text1","abc.html");
Page[1]=new Array("Some text2","More text2","xyz.html");

As you can see, there is at least one entry in each array line, with the final entry being the name of the file being searched for.

Anyway, the question is, whether regexp is best (and if so, some suggested patterns would be great). or if I should be splitting this with split, etc.

Cheers

Answer 1

You are looking for something like this. Note I had the .js file as local so I used file() to load it into array. For your actual script you’ll probably need file_get_contents() if your php can’t access locally the .js file.

<?php
$lines = file('test.js');

    $pages = array();

    foreach($lines as $line) {
        if(strpos($line, 'new Array') != false) {

            preg_match('/Page\[\d\]\s?\=\s?new Array\((\"(.*)",?\s?\n?)+\);/', $line, $matches);


            $values = preg_split('/,(?=(?:[^\"]*\"[^\"]*\")*(?![^\"]*\"))/', $matches[1]);

            $currNo = count($pages);
            $pages[$currNo] = array();

            for($i = 0; $i < count($values); $i++) {
                array_push($pages[$currNo], trim($values[$i], '"'));
            }


        }
    }

    var_dump($pages);

For your example the result will be the following:

array(2) {
  [0]=>
  array(4) {
    [0]=>
    string(10) "Some text1"
    [1]=>
    string(10) "More text1"
    [2]=>
    string(11) "Final Text1"
    [3]=>
    string(8) "abc.html"
  }
  [1]=>
  array(3) {
    [0]=>
    string(10) "Some text2"
    [1]=>
    string(10) "More text2"
    [2]=>
    string(8) "xyz.html"
  }
}

Enjoy!