I am stucked with converting the string of specific format to array. Spliting the string using explodedoesn't seems to be the right approach and i am not so good with regular expressions. So my question is how can i convert the following string to array?
Current format of the string
maxWidth: 800,
openEffect: elastic,
closeEffect: elastic,
helpers : {
title : {
type: outside
},
thumbs : {
width : 50,
height : 50
}
}
Desired Array
array(
'maxWidth' => 800,
'openEffect' => 'elastic',
'closeEffect' => 'elastic',
'helpers' => array(
'title' => array('type' => 'outside'),
'thumbs' => array('width' => 50, 'height' => 50)
)
)
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The string in your example is almost a valid JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) structure!
Here's what your string would look like as valid JSON
{"maxWidth": 800,
"openEffect": "elastic",
"closeEffect": "elastic",
"helpers": {
"title": {
"type": "outside"
},
"thumbs": {
"width": 50,
"height": 50
}
}
}
So our approach (as suggested by @WiseGuy) would be to first inject a few characters with preg_replace to Turn your string init into valid JSON:
The regex above is using the Word Boundaries anchor to add quotation marks around all words. Then we wrap the whole thing in curly braces and voilà, we've got a x-language compatible object format.