Question

I am trying to export data into an analysis but I’m doing something wrong.

Basically I have a report that has between 1 and 9 subjects.
I am writing this export-tool from scratch, the data is from a legacy system.

The analysis should be exported as CSV, with columns like:

'report_id';'subject0';'subject1'…all the way to 'subject9'

I tried foreach-ing over an array of subjects of a report, and keeping count:

$iterator=0;
foreach ($subjects as $subject)
{
  $this->analysis [$report_id] ->subject${iterator} = (string)$subject;
  $iterator++;
}

Update
Because I may not use variables on the right side of the arrow operator, I’ve rewritten it as a very un-DRY switch:

$iterator = 0;
foreach ($categories as $subject)
  {
    switch ($iterator)
    {
    case 0:
      $this->analysis [$report_id] ->subject0 =  $subject;
      break;
    case 1:
      $this->analysis [$report_id] ->subject1 =  $subject;
      break;
    case 2:
      $this->analysis [$report_id] ->subject2 =  $subject;
      break;
    // I have 6 more cases, just to fill all 9 subjects, snipped for brevity

    default:
      //some errorhandling //snipped for brevity
      break 2;
    } 
    $iterator++;
  } 

$this->analysis [$report_id] is an object that stores strings as follows:
$this->analysis [$report_id] ->subject0 = "foo"
The $report_id is a result of an earlier loop.
$this->analysis is an array filled with (report)objects that are included in the analysis.

I hope that anyone can find the flaw and point me in the direction of DRY-ing up my implementation. Bonus points for the philosophy behind it, so that I’m not only helped with this problem, but have a better understanding of the oop-php world.

Answer 1

I have no idea where the $report_id come from …
Usually, I will do this :-

$iterator = $i = 0;
foreach ($categories as $subject)
{
  $var = "subject{$i}";
  $this->analysis [$report_id]->$var =  $subject;
  ++$i;
  if ($i >= 10)
  {
    // what is your error?
  }
}

make use of variable to represent variable variable
docs :- http://php.net/manual/en/language.variables.variable.php