Question

PHP script to read in user action requests and parse them to their components. Example, user types in SET Colour = Blue or describe Chocolate Cake = The best cake ever! I’m using like this:

$actionKeyword = strtok( $actionRequest, " " ); // keyword followed by space
$name = strtok( "=" ); // Then name followed by equals
$description = strtok(null); // get the rest of the string

I could not find anything on getting the rest of the string. PHP.net’s example was using spaces to tokenize each word but there was no character I could think of that might not be part of the description. This solution works in my tests.

Is there a side effect or special case this would fail on? Or is this a perfectly safe and acceptable way of getting the rest of the line?

Answer 1

It shouldn’t cause any bugs now, as null gets converted to an empty string when strtok parses its parameters.

But you probably will be a bit safer if you use strtok('') form explicitly. The reason why it works is that strtok expects a stringified list of delimiter characters as a token param. So an empty string here is basically an empty list of delimiters. And no delimiters to look for means the whole remaining string to return. )

By the way, this advice is given in comments at the manual page. )