Question

I am new to using multidimensional arrays with php, I have tried to stay away from them because they confused me, but now the time has come that I put them to good use. I have been trying to understand how they work and I am just not getting it.

What I am trying to do is populate results based on a string compare function, once I find some match to an ‘item name’, I would like the first slot to contain the ‘item name’, then I would like to increment the priority slot by 1.

So when when I’m all done populating my array, it is going to have a variety of different company names, each with their respective priority…

I am having trouble understanding how to declare and manipulate the following array:

$matches = array(
    'name'=>array('somename'),
    'priority'=>array($priority_level++)
);

Answer 1

So, in what you have, your variable $matches will point to a keyed array, the ‘name’ element of that array will be an indexed array with 1 entry ‘somename’, there will be a ‘priority’ entry with a value which is an indexed array with one entry = $priority_level.

I think, instead what you probably want is something like:

$matches[] = array(name => 'somename', $priority => $priority_level++);

That way, $matches is an indexed array, where each index holds a keyed array, so you could address them as:

$matches[0]['name'] and $matches[0]['priority'], which is more logical for most people.