Write php array code to file without evaluating expressions

If I understand you correctly, your solution is to have a string representation of your array so the statements are not evaluated. I would serialize that array and put that string into the file. Tell your peeps to unserialize it right after they receive it. Better yet, json_encode your array which is going to give you a json string. You can put that in via put_file_contents and tell your peeps to json_decode the contents. They can use it as such json_decode($content, TRUE) which will give them back the associative array.

Update

So you want to write straight up PHP. I see that you have connection stuff in your array so I am thinking it is safe to think it is some sort of a configuration file that includes connection settings etc.

// filename should have the .ini at the end 
function writeConfig( $filename, $yourArray ) {
    $fh = fopen($filename, "w");
    // making sure its available
    if (!is_resource($fh)) {
        return false;
    }
    // start dumping you array to the file 
    foreach ($yourArray as $key => $value) {
        fwrite($fh, sprintf("%s = %s\n", $key, $value));
    }
    fclose($fh); // close file

    return true;
}

when you want to read it

function readConfigFile( $fileThatMadeAbove ) {
    return parse_ini_file($fileThatYouMadeAbove, false, INI_SCANNER_NORMAL);
}

Since it is config info, it may be better to use the ini in php.

If you want to try plain simple solution

$fp=fopen('filename.php','w');
fwrite($fp, "$yourArray");
fclose($fp);

I honestly do not know if you can do "$yourArray" or not and I do not have a place to test it. You most likely need to do a print_r($yourArray) because it is a string that you write to a file which is why I made my recommendation above.

I am out of ideas. Good luck (:

This isn't possible using var_export. The best way I can see to do this is to create a string of the output and use file_put_contents to output this to a file.

This could be achieved by replicating the array structure, e.g.

$arr_str = "[\n";
         . "\t'simple_annotations' => false,\n"
         . "];";

Or by creating a helper function to use instead of var_export. Something like this:

function var_str($var, $level = 0){
    if(is_array($var)) return arr_str($var, $level+1);
    elseif(is_string($var)) return '\''.$var.'\'';
    elseif(is_numeric($var)) return $var;
    elseif(is_null($var)) return 'null';
    elseif(is_bool($var)) return ($var ? 'true' : 'false');
}

function arr_str($arr, $level){
    $str = "[\n";
    foreach($arr as $k => $e){
        $str .= str_repeat("\t", $level);
        $str .= "'".$k."' => ".var_str($e, $level).",\n";
    }
    return $str.str_repeat("\t", $level-1).']';
}

print var_str($my_array);

After searching for a few hours I came to the conclusion the only way to take full control over what I wanted to do was to use a templating engine.

The project this is for uses Laravel so I used Blade but any engine would work (I initially tried this with Twig).

I wrote out each section of my config as if it was a regular php array and then used Blade bracketing to encompass the logic needed to find the right value for each key. If the value was not an expression I evaluated the code, and if it was I wrote the expression into a string.

I ended up with this:

//example.blade.php

[
    'meta' => '{{{ $isFork ? $data['metadata']['driver'] : 'annotations' }}}',
    'connection' => {{{ $isFork ? '\''.$data['connection'].'\'' : 'config("database.default")'  }}},
    'paths' => {{ var_export(ArrayUtil::get($data['metadata']['paths'], $data['metadata']), true) }},
    'repository' => '{{{ ArrayUtil::get($data['repository'], EntityRepository::class) }}}',
    'proxies' => [
        'namespace' => {{{ isset($data['proxy']['namespace']) ? '\'' . $data['proxy']['namespace'] .'\'' : 'false' }}},
        'path'          => '{{{ ArrayUtil::get($data['proxy']['directory'], storage_path('proxies')) }}}',
        'auto_generate' => {{{ ArrayUtil::get($data['proxy']['auto_generate'], env('DOCTRINE_PROXY_AUTOGENERATE', 'false')) }}}
    ],
    'events'     => [
        'listeners'   => [],
        'subscribers' => []
    ],
    'filters' => []
]

and the output:

[
            'meta' => 'yaml',
            'connection' => config('database.default'),
            'paths' => array(
                0 => '/proj/app/Models/mappings',
            ),
            'repository' => 'Doctrine\ORM\EntityRepository',
            'proxies' => [
                'namespace' => false,
                'path' => '/proj/storage/proxies',
                'auto_generate' => false
            ],
            'events' => [
                'listeners' => [],
                'subscribers' => []
            ],
            'filters' => []
]

You can see that where I potentially needed to expand an array I used var_export. Other than it was pretty straight forward.