How to grab value of custom tag and value between tag

Question

The idea is to grab values from the following string.

String: Server has [cpu]4[cpu] cores and [ram]16gb[ram]

I need to grab the tags value and what is between the tag dynamically: should not matter what is between [*]*[*]

Output: Should be an array as follows

Array(
    'cpu' => 4,
    'ram' => '16gb'
)

Having a lot of trouble with the regex pattern. Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT: the value between tags or the tags themselves can be anything - Alphanumeric or Numeric.

The sample string is a sample only. Tags can appear unlimited times and the array therefore needs to be populated on the fly - not manually.

Answer 1

My PHP is rusty, but maybe:

$str = "Server has [cpu]4[cpu] cores and [ram]16gb[ram] and [memory]2tb[/memory]";
$matches = array();
preg_match_all('/\[(\w+)\]([^\[\]]+)\[\/?\w+\]/', $str, $matches);
$output = array_combine($matches[1], $matches[2]);

Details:

• Anything but a [ or ] can appear in [] as the tag.
• Anything but a [ or ] can be the value of the tag
• The closing tag doesn't need to match the starting tag. You could use a backreference, but then it would be case sensitive.

Answer 2

$string = '[cpu]4[cpu] cores and [ram]16gb[ram]';

preg_match('|\[([^\]]+)\]([^\[]+)\[/?[^\]]+\][^\[]+\[([^\]]+)\]([^\[]+)\[/?[^\]]+\]|', $string, $matches);
$array = array($matches[1] => $matches[2], $matches[3] => $matches[4]);

print_r($array);

Answer 3

Working Code, slightly modified version of walkerneo:

Others can build upon my code or suggest me in doing something better:

<pre><?php
    $string = "Server has [cpu]4[cpu] cores and [ram]16gb[ram] and [memory]2tb[/memory]";
    $matches = array();
    $pattern = '/\[(\w+)\]([^\[\]]+)\[\/?\w+\]/';
    preg_match_all($pattern, $string, $matches);
    $output = array_combine($matches[1], $matches[2]);
    var_dump($output);
?></pre>

Fiddle: http://phpfiddle.org/main/code/n1i-e1p