Hacker News Reader

Comment by RossM | Hacker News Reader

I've found one use-case for mixed-keys: parsing complex headers. For example:

    Link: <http://cdn.example.com/stylesheet.css>; rel=stylesheet; type=text/css

    [
      [0] => <http://cdn.example.com/stylesheet.css>
      [rel] => stylesheet
      [type] => text/css
    ]

It doesn't come up very often.

View on HN

This actually reminds me of what you get if you use named capture groups in PHP:

    php > $link = 'http://example.com/';
    php > preg_match('#http://(?P<domain>[^/]+)/#', $link, $matches);
    php > print_r($matches);
    Array
    (
        [0] => http://example.com/
        [domain] => example.com
        [1] => example.com
    )

There's some utility to it, but it can provide unexpected results if you blindly iterating through the match array (though I can't see any reason to do so if you know what offsets you want).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com