Parsing command arguments in PHP

Question

Is there a native \"PHP way\" to parse command arguments from a string? For example, given the following string:

foo \"bar \\\"baz         


        

Answer 1

I suggest something like:

$str = <<\\\\\\\\)*'|\"(?:.*)(?\\\\\\\\)*\")/U", $str, null, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);

var_dump(array_filter(array_map('trim', $match)));

With some assistance from: string to array, split by single and double quotes for the regexp

You still have to unescape the strings in the array after.

array(3) {
  [0]=>
  string(3) "foo"
  [1]=>
  string(13) ""bar \"baz\"""
  [3]=>
  string(10) "'\'quux\''"
}

But you get the picture.