PHP/Laravel – find and read ‘key-value pair’ from file

I want to store some text informations but I don’t want to use database for this. For example there is a file:

key1: some text information 1
key2: some text information 2
key3: another text information

I was wondering, what is the shortest way to find one specific value form this file using PHP or Laravel?

I could use foreach(file('yourfile.txt') as $line) {} loop to store text lines into array and then find the line with specific key, but maybe there is shorter or nicer way to do this.

Answer

If all lines are in the same format ([key]: [value]) you can simply use explode(": ", $line) to get the values, and then rewrite them to a PHP array;

// getData('yourfile.txt') returns an associative array
function getData($file) {
    $data = file($file);
    $returnArray = array()
    foreach($data as $line) {
        $explode = explode(": ", $line);
        $returnArray[$explode[0]] = $explode[1];
    }

    return $returnArray;
}