Question

Here’s something simple for someone to answer for me. I’ve tried searching but I don’t know what I’m looking for really.

I have an array from a JSON string, in PHP, of cast and crew members for a movie.

Here I am pulling out only the people with the job name ‘Actor’

  foreach ($movies[0]->cast as $cast) {
      if ($cast->job == 'Actor') {
    echo '<p><a href="people.php?id=' . $cast->id . '">' . $cast->name . ' - ' . $cast->character . '</a></p>';
      }
  }

The problem is, I would like to be able to limit how many people with the job name ‘Actor’ are pulled out. Say, the first 3.

So how would I pick only the first 3 of these people from this array?

Answer 1

Use a variable called $num_actors to track how many you’ve already counted, and break out of the loop once you get to 3.

$num_actors = 0;
foreach ( $movies[0]->cast as $cast ) {
    if ( $cast->job == 'Actor' ) {
        echo '...';

        $num_actors += 1;
        if ( $num_actors == 3 )
            break;
    }
}