Azure App Service: How to read and parse connection strings via PHP

On Azure App Service, developers have the ability to configure the connection strings as key-value pair under App Settings section. Here is a sample screenshot:

At runtime, Azure App Service retrieves this key-value pair for you and makes them available to your hosted application. These are provided to the web app as Environment Variables.

Here is a good article on how to these work internally: How Application Strings and Connection Strings Work

Here is a sample code on how to read the app settings in PHP

<?php
    $connstr = getenv("MYSQLCONNSTR_MySqlDB");    

    //Parse the above environment variable to retrieve username, password and hostname.
    foreach ($_SERVER as $key => $value)
    {
        if (strpos($key, "MYSQLCONNSTR_") !== 0)
        {
            continue;
        }
        $hostname = preg_replace("/^.*Data Source=(.+?);.*$/", "\\1", $value);
        $username = preg_replace("/^.*User Id=(.+?);.*$/", "\\1", $value);
        $password = preg_replace("/^.*Password=(.+?)$/", "\\1", $value);
        break;
    }
    echo "Server Name: ".$hostname."</br>";
    //connection to the database
    $dbhandle = mysql_connect($hostname, $username, $password) or die("Unable to connect to MySQL");
    echo "<br>Connected to DB server successfully</br>";
    //select a database to work with
    $selectDb = mysql_select_db("db_name",$dbhandle) or die("Could not select database");
    //execute the SQL query and return records
    $sqlQuery = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM Table") or die("Could not query database");

    mysql_close($dbhandle);
?>

Summary

The sample code is a way to get started on how to retrieve the connection strings at runtime in PHP. I have used the above sample to read from a database and display it on a page. The project is hosted on GitHub. See here: https://github.com/kaushalp/Problematique/edit/master/ProblematicMvc/client.php