Question

The idea is to grab values from the following string.

String: Server has [cpu]4[cpu] cores and [ram]16gb[ram]

I need to grab the tags value and what is between the tag dynamically: should not matter what is between [*]*[*]

Output: Should be an array as follows

Array(
    'cpu' => 4,
    'ram' => '16gb'
)

Having a lot of trouble with the regex pattern. Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT: the value between tags or the tags themselves can be anything – Alphanumeric or Numeric.

The sample string is a sample only. Tags can appear unlimited times and the array therefore needs to be populated on the fly – not manually.

Answer 1

My PHP is rusty, but maybe:

$str = "Server has [cpu]4[cpu] cores and [ram]16gb[ram] and [memory]2tb[/memory]";
$matches = array();
preg_match_all('/\[(\w+)\]([^\[\]]+)\[\/?\w+\]/', $str, $matches);
$output = array_combine($matches[1], $matches[2]);

Details:

• Anything but a [ or ] can appear in [] as the tag.
• Anything but a [ or ] can be the value of the tag
• The closing tag doesn’t need to match the starting tag. You could use a backreference, but then it would be case sensitive.