Name PHP specifiers in printf() strings

Question

Is there a way in PHP to name my specifiers like in Python?

I want this in PHP:

$foo = array(\'name\' => 24);
printf(\"%(name)d\", $foo);

Answer 1

Nice question!

You can roll your own without too much trouble by working with regexes. I based the implementation on the idea of calling vsprintf, which is closest to the stated goal among the built-in printf family of functions:

function vsprintf_named($format, $args) {
    $names = preg_match_all('/%\((.*?)\)/', $format, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

    $values = array();
    foreach($matches as $match) {
        $values[] = $args[$match[1]];
    }

    $format = preg_replace('/%\((.*?)\)/', '%', $format);
    return vsprintf($format, $values);
}

To test:

$foo = array('age' => 5, 'name' => 'john');
echo vsprintf_named("%(name)s is %(age)02d", $foo);

Update: My initial implementation was very lambda-happy. Turns out a super basic foreach will suffice, which also makes the function usable in PHP >= 4.1 (not 100% sure about the specific version, but should be around there).

See it in action.