Question

Hello,

I want to grab the ordinal number of an array key inside a foreach loop.

Example

<?php
$array = array("id" => 2, "username" => "foobar");
foreach($array as $value){
$array_key = search_array($value, $array);
//find the ordinal number of $array_key from $array here.
echo $value;
}

count returns the entire number of array keys in the array, i need to grab the ordinal number of the array key.
I hope you guys understand what i ask.

Answer 1

From what I understand, if an entry has a string key, it doesn’t have an ordinal position in the array. From http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.array.php:

An array in PHP is actually an ordered map. A map is a type that associates values to keys. This type is optimized for several different uses; it can be treated as an array, list (vector), hash table (an implementation of a map), dictionary, collection, stack, queue, and probably more. As array values can be other arrays, trees and multidimensional arrays are also possible.

Ordered maps don’t assign ordinal keys on top of the already existing string keys.

What you could do though, to get a psuedo-ordinal-key is increment a variable.

$i=0;

foreach( $array as $key => $value ) {
    echo $i.':'.$key.':'.$value;
    $i++;
}

Will echo out each ordinal key, key, and value in the array.