Happy Pixels

The problem: you need to turn the values of an HTML select element into a PHP array, and you don't want to do it by hand because it has a lot of entries.

The solution: regular expressions! (using Eclipse's regex search/replace).

1. Copy the HTML code of the select element whose values you want to get.
2. In eclipse, paste the code in your PHP file.
3. Press Ctrl+F to open the find/replace window.
4. Click the "Regular expressions" checkbox.
5. Find: <option value="(\w)">(.)</option>
6. Replace: '$1' => '$2',
7. Click "Replace All".
8. Manually replace the opening and closing <select> tags with array( and );