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Using Laravel for Advanced String Manipulation in PHP

Splitting Strings Containing Paired Brackets

Explore advanced string splitting techniques in Laravel by developing a parsing approach that counts balanced paired brackets and ignores parentheses inside quotes. Understand how to implement cursor-based parsing classes to accurately split complex strings with nested structures, enabling robust handling of PHP string manipulations.

We'll cover the following...

Suppose we have the input text provided below:

($one, $two, ($string .")" )), $three, hello,
"(this", "that )", $end($one, ($two))

And that we would like to split it into the array of strings as shown below:

array:6 [
  0 => "($one, $two, ($string .")" ))"
  1 => " $three"
  2 => " hello"
  3 => """
    
    "(this"
    """
  4 => " "that )""
  5 => " $end($one, ($two))"
]

However, if the entire input text is surrounded in parentheses, as shown below:

(($one, $two, ($string .")" )), $three, hello,
"(this", "that )", $end($one, ($two)))

We want to produce an array containing only a single value, which would be the input string:

array:1 [
  0 => """
    (($one, $two, ($string .")" )), $three, hello,
    "(this", "that )", $end($one, ($two)))
    """
]

At first, this might seem like an incredibly complex problem to solve. However, if we analyze our expected output ...