What are the best practices for parsing and evaluating arrays defined within a PHP string using regex?

When parsing and evaluating arrays defined within a PHP string using regex, it's important to first extract the array content using a regular expression pattern and then use PHP functions like `json_decode` to convert the extracted array string into a PHP array for further manipulation. It's recommended to use a robust regular expression pattern that can handle different array structures and nested arrays. 

<?php
// Sample PHP string containing an array definition
$string = 'array(1, 2, 3, "foo", array("bar", "baz"))';

// Extract the array content using regex
preg_match('/array\((.*?)\)/', $string, $matches);
$arrayString = $matches[1];

// Convert the extracted array string into a PHP array
$array = json_decode('[' . $arrayString . ']', true);

// Output the parsed array
print_r($array);
?>

Keywords

PHP regex array parsing evaluation string manipulation

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