Question

I am creating a findSpellings function that has two parameters $word and $allWords. $allwords is an array that has mis-spellings of words that could sound similar to the $word variable. What I am trying to accomplish is to print out all words that are similar to the $word based on the soundex function. I am having trouble printing out the array with words. My function that I have is below. Any help would be greatly appreciated:

<?php 
$word = 'stupid';

$allwords = array(
    'stupid',
    'stu and pid',
    'hello',
    'foobar',
    'stpid',
    'supid',
    'stuuupid',
    'sstuuupiiid',
);
function findSpellings($word, $allWords){
while(list($id, $str) = each($allwords)){

    $soundex_code = soundex($str);

    if (soundex($word) == $soundex_code){
        //print '"' . $word . '" sounds like ' . $str;
        return $word;
        return $allwords;
    }
    else {
        return false;
    }

}
 }
 print_r(findSpellings($word, $allWords));
?>

Answer 1

if (soundex($word) == $soundex_code){
    //print '"' . $word . '" sounds like ' . $str;
    return $word;
    return $allwords;
}

You can’t have 2 returns, the first return will exit the code.

You could just do something like this:

if (soundex($word) == $soundex_code){
    //print '"' . $word . '" sounds like ' . $str;
    $array = array('word' => $word, 'allWords' => $allWords);
    return $array;
}

And then just retrieve the values out of $array like so:

$filledArray = findSpellings($word, $allWords);

echo "You typed".$filledArray['word'][0]."<br/>";
echo "Were you looking for one of the following words?<br/>";

foreach($filledArray['allWords'] as $value)
{
    echo $value;
}