You're regex doesn't make sense as you have it. For one thing you are missing delimiters. The {, }, and . are all special regex characters so they should be escaped. This also looks like a JSON data structure so the JSON functions might be of use to you. If you still want to go REGEX here's how I'd do it presuming your data structure is consistent.
<?php
$string = "{'/Users/aaron/Applications/developer-vagrant/web/g.php': {'total': 22}}
{'/Users/aaron/.vim/autoload/timetap.vim': {'total': 0}}
{'/Users/aaron/.vimrc': {'total': 5}}
{'/Users/aaron/Documents/Programming/PHP/TimeTapCLI/composer.json': {'total': 144}}
{'/Users/aaron/Documents/Programming/PHP/TimeTapCLI/timetap.php': {'total': 351}}
{'/Users/aaron/Box/linux/.vim/autoload/timetap.vim': {'total': 37}}
{'/Users/aaron/Box/cats.tex': {'total': 184}}";
$pattern = '~^\{(.*)\}$~m';
$data[] = preg_replace_callback($pattern, function($matches) {
global $output_data;
preg_match("~'(.*?)'\s*:\s*\{'(.*?)'\s*:\s*(\d+)\}~", $matches[1], $output);
$output_data[$output[1]] = array($output[2] => $output[3]);
}, $string);
print_r($output_data);
Output:
Array
(
[/Users/aaron/Applications/developer-vagrant/web/g.php] => Array
(
[total] => 22
)
[/Users/aaron/.vim/autoload/timetap.vim] => Array
(
[total] => 0
)
[/Users/aaron/.vimrc] => Array
(
[total] => 5
)
[/Users/aaron/Documents/Programming/PHP/TimeTapCLI/composer.json] => Array
(
[total] => 144
)
[/Users/aaron/Documents/Programming/PHP/TimeTapCLI/timetap.php] => Array
(
[total] => 351
)
[/Users/aaron/Box/linux/.vim/autoload/timetap.vim] => Array
(
[total] => 37
)
[/Users/aaron/Box/cats.tex] => Array
(
[total] => 184
)
)
Here are links to the information on the functions/modifiers I've used.
- http://php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php
- http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace-callback.php
- http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php
I'll do a write up of the parts used here in a bit. If you have particular questions please post.
Explanation of what is happening...
The ~ are delimiters which tell the regex engine where the expression starts at ends. The m on the outside is a modifier which tells it to treat each line as a as a string. The ^ and $ tell it to match to start and end of a "string", in this case each line because of the m modifier. The \ before the { is to escape the curly brace which has a special context in regex. The . is any character and the * is a quantifier meaning zero or more occurrences. When these are paired together it means zero or more of any characters. The () around this are a capturing group which stores what is inside it, and the \} is so we stop a the last curly brace. So from {'/Users/aaron/Applications/developer-vagrant/web/g.php': {'total': 22}} we end up with '/Users/aaron/Applications/developer-vagrant/web/g.php': {'total': 22}. We pass this into a function because we want to filter this down further. We use the global here because we are inside of this anonymous function and want it to be accessible when we are done.The '(.*?)' is searching for everything between the single quotes. This is known as a lazy/non greedy, the ? makes it stop at the first occurrence of the next character (the single quote). The \s* are any amount of whitespace. The rest of the regex here should be decipherable from the previous descriptions. The $matches[1] is because we want to first grouped value from the preg_replace_callback the $matches[0] is everything that was found (same with preg_match). Then on the final line we assign our global variable the new value.
