Parsing a list of Key:Value pairs
24 Feb 2007[tags]best practices,php,openID[/tags] [PHP]: http://php.net/ [openID]: http://openid.net/ [reviewsby.us]: http://reviewsby.us/ [symfony]: http://www.symfony-project.com/
I’m working on implementing [openID][] for [reviewsby.us][] and for use in [symfony][] apps. One thing I was having trouble with was parsing key value pairs, which is one of the requirements to reading responses. It’s a fairly easy task, but [PHP][] offers so many ways to do this.
[openID][] calls for the following Key-Value format:
Lines of:
- some_key:some value
- There MUST NOT be a space before or after the colon.
- Newline characters MUST be Unix-style, just ASCII character 10 (“\n”).
- Newlines MUST BE at end of each line as well as between lines.
- MIME type is unspecified, but text/plain is RECOMMENDED.
- Character encoding MUST BE UTF-8.
So here is my attempt at parsing something like this as efficiently and error free as possible:
I wrote this function as I was writing the post… and it came out way faster than my previous implementations using strtok or a combination of explode and trim. Which is good to hear since I do use preg_ functions quite a bit in PHP and they definitely have their place.
I’m curious if people have found a faster way of parsing through a string of Key-Value pairs. I’ll run it in a test harness and stand corrected if someone comes through with something faster ;).