splitting a string into similar elements along with the values - parsing

Question

I have a string like
$query = "date=20.10.2007&amount=400+date=11.02.2008&amount=1400+date=12.03.2008&amount=1500";
there are two variables named date and amount containing a value e.g date= 20.10.2007 and amount=400 and these two variables repeat itself with different values and each set (date & amount) are separated by '+' sign. Now i want to display this string like this:
Date Amount
20.10.2007 400
11.02.2008 1400
12.02.2008 1500
Need help

Answer 1

We can make judicious use of explode and preg_split here to get the output you want:
$query = "date=20.10.2007&amount=400+date=11.02.2008&amount=1400+date=12.03.2008&amount=1500";
$array = explode("+", $query);
$counter = 0;
echo "Date Amount\n";
foreach($array as $item) {
if ($counter > 0) echo "\n";
$parts = explode("&", $item);
echo preg_split("/=/", $parts[0])[1] . " ";
echo preg_split("/=/", $parts[1])[1];
$counter = $counter + 1;
}
This prints:
Date Amount
20.10.2007 400
11.02.2008 1400
12.03.2008 1500
The logic here is that we first split the query string on + to obtain components looking like:
date=20.10.2007&amount=400
Then, inside the loop over all such components, we split again by & to obtain the date and amount terms. Finally, each of these are split again on = to get the actual values.

Answer 2

Thanks a lot Tim Biegeleisen for your kind guidance. From your help i did it with this code below:
$str = "date=20.10.2007&amount=400+date=11.02.2008&amount=1400+date=12.03.2008&amount=1500"; $array = explode("+",$str);
$i = 0;
echo nl2br("Date Amount \n");
foreach($array as $item[$i])
{
parse_str($item[$i]);
echo $date;
echo $amount."<br>";
$i++;
}