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

There really is no native function for parsing commands to my knowledge. However, I have created a function which does the trick natively in PHP. By using str_replace several times, you are able to convert the string into something array convertible. I don't know how fast you consider fast, but when running the query 400 times, the slowest query was under 34 microseconds.

function get_array_from_commands($string) {
    /*
    **  Turns a command string into a field
    **  of arrays through multiple lines of 
    **  str_replace, until we have a single
    **  string to split using explode().
    **  Returns an array.
    */

    // replace single quotes with their related
    // ASCII escape character
    $string = str_replace("\'","'",$string);
    // Do the same with double quotes
    $string = str_replace("\\\"",""",$string);
    // Now turn all remaining single quotes into double quotes
    $string = str_replace("'","\"",$string);
    // Turn " " into " so we don't replace it too many times
    $string = str_replace("\" \"","\"",$string);
    // Turn the remaining double quotes into @@@ or some other value
    $string = str_replace("\"","@@@",$string);
    // Explode by @@@ or value listed above
    $string = explode("@@@",$string);
    return $string;
}