php preg_replace expression

Question

I need an expression for PHP preg_replace so just replace "[" and "]" with "(" and ")" only for none PHP arrays. Please read the question and see the sample carefully...

Thank you...

Sample:

// input
$foo[];
bar["name"];

// output
$foo[];
bar("name");

Answer 1

I don't know what " only for none PHP arrays " means, but if you're just replacing individual characters, why use a preg? str_replace() should work just fine.

[ghoti@pc ~]$ cat doit
#!/usr/local/bin/php
<?php

$text="a[b]c\n";

$in = array( "[", "]" );
$out = array( "(", ")" );

print str_replace($in, $out, $text);

[ghoti@pc ~]$ ./doit
a(b)c
[ghoti@pc ~]$ 

Answer 2

preg_replace(array("/\[/", "/\]/"),array("(", ")"), $content);

Thats the simplest you can do to replace [ with ( and ] with ). Unless your after something a bit more complex?

Answer 3

This should do (the tricky part is to differentiate variables from other stuff):

^(.*[,;\?:/"'\(\)\[\]-+={}#@*^ ~&!%]+)*\[([^\]]*)\](.*)
|                  1                   |2|   3    |4| 5|
(before)[(inside)](after)

1: makes sure it's not a PHP variable

2: the opening bracket

3: what's inside the brackets (it might be an issue if there are nested brackets, like if you do mustMatch[$mustNotMatch[somekey]] , you'll probably end up with mustMatch($mustNotMatch[somekey)] , which is weird and can probably be dealt with if you need to)

4: the closing bracket

5: whatever is after the brackets

So this should (not tested ^^) match the pattern in the following cases:

bar[] > bar()
bar[foo] > bar(foo)
a+bar["foo"] > a+bar("foo")
@foo[bar] > @foo(bar)
a+$foo[bar[foo]]*bar[foo] > a+$foo[bar(foo)]*bar(foo)
this is a $foo[bar] with a [bar] > this is a $foo[bar] with a (bar)

And it should not match in the following cases:

$foo[]
$foo[bar]
a-$foo[bar]
@$foo[bar]

Hope this helps (and works ^^)

Answer 4

I'm not great at regular expressions so in pseudocode what you need is to pickup:

[whitespace] then [Any alpha numeric] then [square brace] then [double quote] then [record the value]
then [double quote] then [square brace]