Convert a string to a PHP array (json_decode analogue for PHP array representation)

Question

I have the following string (taken from a user) in PHP "array" format.

array(
  array('age', '30', '>'),
  array(
    array('city', 'New Delhi'),
    array('city', 'New York')
  )
);

I wan't to convert this string to a PHP array without using eval (because I want to avoid its security risks). This is similar to doing json_decode. However, in this case the syntax is in PHP. Is this possible in a quick / easy way?

Can't you get it in a different, language-independent format? Because off the top of my head, I don't think there's a PHP array format parser in PHP (weird, innit? ;)). Unless there's already a library for it, I'd parse the string with the PHP tokenizer and build something that assembles the parsed tokens into a real array. That's a lot of work though if you could simply request the input to be JSON formatted (or something else). — deceze
– deceze ♦, Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 6:31

Petah · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-07 06:43:34Z

2

You could try this, but it will obviously fail in a lot of cases

$s = "array(
  array('age', '30', '>'),
  array(
    array('city', 'New Delhi'),
    array('city', 'New York')
  )
);
";
$rep = trim(str_replace(array('array(', ')', "\r", "\n", ' ', "'"), array('[', ']', '', '', '', '"'), $s), ';');
var_dump(json_decode($rep));
var_dump($rep);

answered Dec 7, 2011 at 6:43

Petah

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