Create an array based on a specific string in PHP

Question

I have a problem, I would like to ask for this string:

[NAME: abc] [EMAIL: [e-mail]] [TIMEFRAME: 3 weeks] [BUDGET: 1000 dollars] [MESSAGE: bla bla bla]

Replace it with an array in the form:

array(
        'NAME'      => 'abc',
        'EMAIL'     => '[e-mail]',
        'TIMEFRAME' => '3 weeks',
        'BUDGET'    => '1000 dollars',
        'MESSAGE'   => 'bla bla bla' );

I tried to do something like this:

$content = str_replace(array('[', ']'), '', '[NAME: abc] [EMAIL: [e-mail]] [TIMEFRAME: 3 weeks] [BUDGET: 1000 dollars] [MESSAGE: bla bla bla]');
preg_match_all('/[A-Z]+\:/', $content, $inputs);

I managed to pull out the "keys", but I do not know how to pull out their "values". Any ideas?

Thank you in advance for your help and I apologize for my English.

Answer 1

You may use the following regex:

'~\[(\w+):\s*([^][]*)]~'

See the regex demo.

Details

• \[ - a [ char
• (\w+) - Group 1: 1+ letters, digits or _
• : - a colon
• \s* - 0+whitespaces
• ([^][]*) - Group 2: 0+ chars other than [ and ]
• ] - a ] char.

See the PHP demo:

$s = "[NAME: abc] [EMAIL: cde] [TIMEFRAME: efg] [BUDGET: hij] [MESSAGE: klm]";
if (preg_match_all('~\[(\w+):\s*([^][]*)]~', $s, $m)) {
    array_shift($m); // Removes whole match values from array
    print_r(array_combine($m[0], $m[1])); // Build the result with keys (Group 1) and values (Group 2)
}