splitting a string into an array with php

Question

how would i go about splitting the following format string into an array?

[13:05:37] [Server thread/INFO]: [0;35;1m[Server[0;35;1m] hi[m

the string format is from a mine craft server and i believe the format is

[time] [thread info]: ANSICOLOROPEN[stringANSICOLORCLOSE] string EOL

how could i split this so the array would be

[0]time 
[1]thread info
[3]ansi open
[4]string
[5]ansi close
[6]string 
[7]EOL marker

Answer 1

I tend to start by exploding these types of log entries on the spaces and then hard-code in the index values since those tend not to change. For example:

$log_line = "[13:05:37] [Server thread/INFO]: [0;35;1m[Server[0;35;1m] hi[m";
$line_parts = explode(" ",$log_line);

$log_data = array(
 'time' => $line_parts[0],
 'thread_info' => $line_parts[1],
 'somethingansirelated' => $line_parts[2]
);

It's much easier to further clean-up your various log datas from here in a variety of ways, for example you could use array_map:

array_map( function( $a ){
  // trim, format, validate, etc.

}, $log_data );

Not sure if this will get mauled as a non-answer or not but it might help, so here you go.

Answer 2

You can try to get all items enclosed by brackets using regular expressions, eg:

$re = "/\[([^\]]+)\]/"; 
$str = "[13:05:37] [Server thread/INFO]: [0;35;1m[Server[0;35;1m] hi[m]"; 

preg_match_all($re, $str, $matches);

Then you can iterate thru the $matches variable which is an array of the possible matches of the pattern being used against your string.

preg_match_all