Sherif Ramadan has a post looking at creating a better operator precedence parser in PHP. His example is a fully PHP implementation that takes equation strings and evaluates them to create the result.

Operator precedence parsers are very simple on the surface. So don’t feel in the least bit intimidated, because by the time you’ve read through this I hope to have you walk away with a solid foundation on how to write your very own operator precedence parser. The goal is to understand how to solve the problem of operator precedence parsing, and not necessarily to write your own parser. Learning how the problem can be solved is the most important thing to take away from this article.

He starts with an introduction to the concepts behind "operator precedence" including processing order and grouping. He also mentions infix and postfix (RPN) notations for handling different formats of equations. He used the "Shunting-yard Algorithm" and how it relates to handling the different parts of the equation, one at a time, in the correct order. He rest of the post is dedicated to the details of the execution in the tool, including code examples and the tokenization of the strings passed into it.