I like writng in PHP, but miss the easy perl way of changing an associative array to a list and then a list to a string. This makes it handy to pass a hidden value of an array as a string and then convert it back to an array when the next step of the script needs it. So, I wrote a couple of functions to do just that.
//array to string function arraytostr ($array=array()) { $length = 0; $foreach ($array as $key => $value) { $keystring .= "$key "; $valuestring .= "$value "; $length++; } return array($length,$keystring,$valuestring); } //sting to array function strtoarray ($length="",$keystring="",$valuestring="") { $keys = explode(" ",$keystring); $values = explode(" ",$valuestring); for ($i=0; $i < $length; $i++) { $key = $keys[$i]; $newarray[$key] = $values[$i]; } return $newarray; }