This looks a little nasty, but it isn't that bad. We make two passes of the array. First to figure out how many bytes to allocate for the result string and the second to actually build the string with a "+" between each symbol name. value.str.len; if(count>0) len++; /* for the + sign */ count++; zend_hash_move_forward_ex(target_hash, &pos); } str = (char *) emalloc(len + 1); zend_hash_internal_pointer_reset_ex(target_hash, &pos); while(zend_hash_get_current_data_ex(target_hash,(void **)&entry, &pos)==SUCCESS) { count--; memcpy(str + target, (*entry)->value.str.val, (*entry)->value.str.len); target += (*entry)->value.str.len; if (count > 0) { *(str+target) = '+'; target++; } zend_hash_move_forward_ex(target_hash, &pos); } *(str+target) = '\0'; /* don't forget to null-terminate */ }]]>