Array from SQL

Anon

I have an array in a SQL database stored inthe form: array("US"=>"United States",...) and when I assign it to a variable it takes it as a string and on doing a typecast or changing the type to array only the word Array remains in the variable and the rest disappears.. Please email me any help.
Thank you..

Anon

Look into the eval statement.

eval($string)

will evaluate $string as php code. So if you read your array string from the database and assign it to $array_string, something like this might work...

eval("\$array = $array_string");

I'm guessing on that syntax...look at the manual to be sure, but eval should do what you want...

---John Holmes...

Anon

Hi,

I do not want to offend, by I must ask why you store an array as a string in the database? You basically add another level of storage, increasing the complexity of your code.

Johan

Anon

Well that didn't work.. and as Johan asks me that why did i store as a string .. it's not stored as a string or as a array but it's just plain text. So i just want to know how to get that code from the database so that PHP takes it as an array and not as a string.
Thank You

Anon

Maybe you should have a whole new table instead of storing the string array in the database...

Something with two columns, one for "US" one for "United States" etc etc...

---JH

Anon

Hi again,

I would strongly suggest John's solution, but if you must use arrays-as-strings, here's the solution:

$string = "\$vec = array(\"foo\" => 1, \"bar\" => 2);";
eval($string);
echo "foo == '".$vec["foo"]."'<br>";
echo "bar == '".$vec["bar"]."'<br>";

This would print
foo == '1'
bar == '2'

Johan

Anon

How are you getting the array from array form into that string form?