read array from string php

Question

I have a string like this

$php_string = '$user["name"] = "Rahul";$user["age"] = 12;$person["name"] = "Jay";$person["age"] = 12;';

or like this

 $php_string = '$user = array("name"=>"Rahul","age"=>12);$person= array("name"=>"Jay","age"=>12);';

I need to get the array from the string ,

Expected result is

print_r($returned);

Array
(
    [name] => Rahul
    [age] => 12
)

Please note that there may be other contents on the string including comments,other php codes etc

Answer 1

Instead of relying on some magical regular expression, I would go a slightly easier route and use token_get_all() to tokenize the string and create a very basic parser that can create the necessary structures based on both array construction methods.

I don't think many people have rolled this themselves but it's likely the most stable solution.

Answer 2

use a combination of eval and preg_match_all like so:

if(preg_match_all('/array\s*\(.*\)/U', $php_string, $arrays)){
    foreach($arrays as $array){
        $myArray = eval("return {$array};");
        print_r($myArray);
    }
}

That will work as long as your array doesn't contain ) but can be modified further to handle that case

or as Jack suggests use token_get_all() like so:

$tokens = token_get_all($php_string);
if(is_array($tokens)){
    foreach($tokens as $token){
        if($token[0] != T_ARRAY)continue;
        $myArray = eval("return {$token[1]};");
        print_r($myArray);
    }
}