How to find all substrings of a string in PHP

Question

I need to convert strings of the form

\"a b c\"

into arrays of the form

Array
(
    [0] => a
    [1] => a b
    [2] =         


        

Answer 1

For even quite short strings, the memory and runtime requirement will explode. Even in native code this is a scary performance problem.

Justify why you need this function, and work out another way around the problem.

Answer 2

Using the in-php-array-is-the-duct-tape-of-the-universe way :P

function get_all_substrings($input, $delim = '') {
    $arr = explode($delim, $input);
    $out = array();
    for ($i = 0; $i < count($arr); $i++) {
        for ($j = $i; $j < count($arr); $j++) {
            $out[] = implode($delim, array_slice($arr, $i, $j - $i + 1));
        }       
    }
    return $out;
}

$subs = get_all_substrings("a b c", " ");
print_r($subs);

Answer 3

This works and it works also with multibyte strings, all the methods above don't, they return null and duplicated values.

function substrings($str, $charset = 'UTF-8') {   
  $length = mb_strlen($str, $charset);

  $subs = [];
  for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++)
    for ($j = 1; $j <= $length; $j++)
      $subs[] = mb_substr($str, $i, $j, $charset);

  return array_unique($subs);
}

print_r(substrings("php"));

Answer 4

They can already be thought of arrays of that form.

Simply address the contents with a function that takes the index as a parameter and returns the string sliced appropriately.

Answer 5

And this question will not be complete without the recursive answer:

function get_substrings($str){
    $len = strlen($str);
    $ans = array();
    $rest = array();
    for ($i = 1; $i <= $len; $i++) {                 
        $ans[] = substr($str, 0, $i);        
    }
    if($str){
        $rest = get_substrings(substr($str, 1));
    }
    return array_merge($ans, $rest);
}

$subs = get_substrings("abc");
print_r($subs);

Answer 6

Minor correction to the second one:

<?php
function get_all_substrings($input){
$subs = array();
$length = strlen($input);
for($i=0; $i<$length; $i++){
    for($j=$i; $j<$length; $j++){
        $subs[] = substr($input, $i, ($j - $i) + 1);    
    }   
}   
return $subs;
}

$subs = get_all_substrings("abc");
print_r($subs);

?>