Parsing a string to php array

Question

I have this line

comment=Accept established chain=forward connection-state=established

And I need to parse it to array. Using explode("=") doesn't work as expected. I get:

array(4) {
  [0]=>
  string(7) "comment"
  [1]=>
  string(24) "Accept established chain"
  [2]=>
  string(24) "forward connection-state"
  [3]=>
  string(11) "established"
}

I tried playing with regex( I suck at it badly). but managed to somehow got to 50%:

preg_match_all("/[([a-zA-Z\-]+=]?/", $line, $result)

which returns:

array(1) {
  [0]=>
  array(3) {
    [0]=>
    string(8) "comment="
    [1]=>
    string(6) "chain="
    [2]=>
    string(17) "connection-state="
  }
}

So it's half way. Now I don't know how to get the string after the "=" part for each line.

Nick · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-05 12:40:38Z

You can use the following regex to parse your string:

([a-z-]+)=(.*?)(?=\s*[a-z-]+=|$)

It looks for some number of a-z or - characters (captured in group 1), followed by an = sign, followed by some (minimal, using ? to make the match lazy) number of characters (captured in group 2) up to either another key followed by = or the end of string. In PHP

$str = 'comment=Accept established chain=forward connection-state=established';
preg_match_all('/([a-z-]+)=(.*?)(?=[a-z-]+=|$)/', $str, $matches);
print_r($matches);

Output (keys are in $matches[1], values in $matches[2]):

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => comment=Accept established 
            [1] => chain=forward 
            [2] => connection-state=established
        )
    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => comment
            [1] => chain
            [2] => connection-state
        )
    [2] => Array
        (
            [0] => Accept established 
            [1] => forward 
            [2] => established
        )
)

Demo on 3v4l.org

Note: if the key values could contain uppercase characters, use the i flag on the regex i.e.

preg_match_all('/([a-z-]+)=(.*?)(?=\s*[a-z-]+=|$)/i', $str, $matches);

Also, if you want to generate a key => value array, just use array_combine:

$values = array_combine($matches[1], $matches[2]);
print_r($values);

Output:

Array
(
    [comment] => Accept established
    [chain] => forward
    [connection-state] => established
)

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