Array path from variable in PHP

Question

So I wrote a class that can parse XML documents and create SQL queries from it to update or insert new rows depending on the settings.

Because the script has to work wit

Answer 1

You can use a foreach with variable variables.

// assuming a base called $array, and the path as in your example:
$path = array('field1','field2');

$$path = $array;
foreach ($path as $v) $$path = $$path[$v];
$$path['value'] = 'test';

Short, simple, and much better than eval.

Answer 2

Use something like this:

/**
 * Sets an element of a multidimensional array from an array containing
 * the keys for each dimension.
 * 
 * @param array &$array The array to manipulate
 * @param array $path An array containing keys for each dimension
 * @param mixed $value The value that is assigned to the element
 */
function set_recursive(&$array, $path, $value)
{
  $key = array_shift($path);
  if (empty($path)) {
    $array[$key] = $value;
  } else {
    if (!isset($array[$key]) || !is_array($array[$key])) {
      $array[$key] = array();
    }
    set_recursive($array[$key], $path, $value);
  }
}

Answer 3

You can bypass the whole counter business with the array append operator:

$some_array[] = 1; // pushes '1' onto the end of the array

As for the whole path business, I'm assuming that's basically an oddball representation of an xpath-like route through your xml document... any reason you can't simply use that string as an array key itself?

$this->BLOCKS['/path/to/the/node/you're/working/on][] = array('name' => $name, 'target' => $target);