The data you give as input in your question:
Parent1@MiddleA%Child|Child|Child|MiddleB%Child|Child|Child|Parent2@MiddleA%|Child
is not really well fitting to produce the output you ask for. It's even syntactically incorrect at it's end, the delimiters in MiddleA%|Child
specifically.
Correnting this, you can easily do it with preg_split
:
$str = 'Parent1@MiddleA%Child|Child|Child|MiddleB%Child|Child|Child|Parent2@MiddleA%Child|';
$elements = preg_split('~([^@%|]+?[@%|])~', $str, 0, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE | PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
$types = '@%|';
foreach($elements as $element)
{
$label = substr($element, 0, -1);
$type = substr($element, -1);
$indentValue = strpos($types, $type);
if (FALSE === $indentValue) throw new Exception('Invalid string given.');
$indent = str_repeat('-', $indentValue * 2 + 1);
printf("%s %s
", $indent, $label);
}
If you don't have the input string in a valid format, you need to fix it first, e.g. with an appropriate parser or you need to react on the bogus cases inside the foreach loop.
Edit: This is an modified example that turns the string into a tree-like structure so you can output it with nested foreach
loops:
$str = 'Parent1@MiddleA%Child|Child|Child|MiddleB%Child|Child|Child|Parent2@MiddleA%Child|';
$types = '@%|';
$pattern = sprintf('~([^%1$s]+?[%1$s])~', $types);
$elements = preg_split($pattern, $str, 0, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE | PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
$tree = array();
foreach($elements as $element)
{
$label = substr($element, 0, -1);
$type = substr($element, -1);
$indentValue = strpos($types, $type);
if (FALSE === $indentValue) throw new Exception('Invalid string given.');
$add =& $tree;
for($i = $indentValue; $i--;)
{
$index = max(0, count($add)-1);
$add =& $add[$index][1];
}
$add[] = array($label, array());
unset($add);
}
foreach($tree as $level1)
{
echo '<div>', $level1[0], "
";
foreach($level1[1] as $level2)
{
echo ' <h3>', $level2[0], '</h3>', "
";
foreach($level2[1] as $level3)
{
echo ' <span>', $level3[0],'</span>', "
";
}
}
echo '</div>', "
";
}
(Demo) - Hope this is helpful.