Question

I am trying to create a PHP function that will echo info from a db. My col names look like banana[1], banana[2], apple[1], apple[2], apple[3], and so on.

The function will select the fruit

function fruits($fruit){

}

and then within that function I’ll loop through the fruits.

How do I echo these?

echo $fruit[$i];

obviously doesn’t work.

Pretty basic, but I can’t figure out. Concatenation kills me.

function ponctuation($section,$sect){

switch($section){
    case 'apple':
        $i=1;
    break;
    case 'banana':
        $i=13;
    break;
}

global $mysql_tablename;
global $FName;
global $Lname;

if(isset($mysql_tablename)){
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM $mysql_tablename WHERE FName='$FName' AND Lname='$Lname'");
    $row = mysql_fetch_array($result);

echo '<form method="post" action="ponctuation.php?'.${$section.$sect}.'_valider">';
echo '<ul>';
$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `ponct_enonces` WHERE `section`='$section' AND `sect`='$sect'");
while($row_q = mysql_fetch_assoc($query)) {
    if($row_q['enon']==0 && $row_q['senon']==0){
        echo '<h2>'.$row_q['enonce'].'</h2>';
    }
    if($row_q['enon']==1){
            echo '<h3>'.$row_q['enonce'].'</h3>';
            echo '<textarea rows="3" cols="100" name="'.$i.'" wrap="physical">' . $row[$section[$i]] . '</textarea>';
    }
    if($row_q['senon']==1){
            echo '<h4>'.$row_q['enonce'].'</h4>';
            echo '<textarea rows="3" cols="100" name="'.$i.'" wrap="physical">' . $row[$section]. '</textarea>';
    }
    $i++;
    }
echo '</ol>';
echo '<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Valider"/>';
echo '</form>';
}

}

The code is a little ugly, and some vars have French names, other have English names.

Answer 1

col names won’t be expanded into PHP array structures for you, e.g.

SELECT fruit[1], fruit[2], ...., fruit[100]

will give you the equivalent of

$row = array(
   'fruit[1]' => someval,
   'fruit[2]' => someval,
   ...
);

if you want to iterate those, you’ll have to get ugly:

$fruit = array();
for ($i = 0; $i <= 100; $i++) {
    $fruit[$i] = $row['fruit[' . $i . ']'];
}

which begs the question of… why? This is a horrible data structure to be using. Properly normalizing it into a ‘fruit attributes’ sub-table would save you this trouble, and also allow you to have n attributes, rather than the fixed 1..100 range or whatever it is you have.