r110422 MediaWiki - Code Review archive

Could you explain what this code is doing?

http_build_query turns an array into the query string of a URL. It has in PHP 5.2 the deficiency of turning spaces into +, so I encode them myself. The foreach loop is garbage.

So why is it first building a query and then decoding it, manually?

http_build_query converts arrays recursively, you get something like "key[subkey][subsubkey]=value". It's not ideal, lots of string manipulation, but it's the easiest and probably still fastest solution I could come up with. I would be happy to put in something more efficient, if you know of anything.

Flattening arrays is not that hard. You could use one of these (not thoroughly tested):

function flatten1( $a ) {
	do {
		$done = true;
		foreach ( $a as $key => $value ) {
			if ( is_array( $value ) ) {
				foreach ( $value as $subkey => $subvalue ) {
					$a[$key . "[$subkey]"] = $subvalue;
				}
				unset( $a[$key] );
				$done = false;
			}
		}
	} while( !$done );
	return $a;
}

function flatten2( $a, $first = true ) {
	foreach ( $a as $key => $value ) {
		if ( is_array( $value ) ) {
			$value = flatten2( $value, false );
			foreach ( $value as $subkey => $subvalue ) {
				$newkey = $first ? $key . "[$subkey]" : "$key][$subkey";
				$a[$newkey] = $subvalue;
			}
			unset( $a[$key] );
		}
	}
	return $a;
}

Note that don't convert all values to strings.