Question

I am working on a front-end web app where a nested unordered list would be used for the jQuery plugin mcdropdown.

Here is the data structure from PHP: a nested array of arrays :

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [fullpath] => ../foil/alphanumeric/
            [depth] => 0
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [fullpath] => ../foil/alphanumeric/letters/
            [depth] => 1
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [fullpath] => ../foil/alphanumeric/numbers/
            [depth] => 1
        )

    [3] => Array
        (
            [fullpath] => ../foil/alphanumeric/numbers/symbols/
            [depth] => 2
        )
)

Basically, I took the excellent answer from this question on SO, modified it a bit :

global $fullpaths; // $fullpaths contains the above data structure in print_r
$result = '';
$currentDepth = -1;

while(!empty($fullpaths))
{
    $currentNode = array_shift($fullpaths);

    if($currentNode['depth'] > $currentDepth)
    {
        $result .='<ul>';
    }

    if($currentNode['depth'] < $currentDepth)
    {
        $result .=str_repeat('</ul>', $currentDepth - $currentNode['depth']);
    }

    $result .= '<li>'. $currentNode['fullpath'] .'</li>';

    $currentDepth = $currentNode['depth'];

    if(empty($fullpaths))
    {
        $result .= str_repeat('</ul>', 1 + $currentDepth);
    }
}

print $result;

and got the following output:

<ul>
    <li>../foil/alphanumeric/</li>
    <ul>
        <li>../foil/alphanumeric/letters/</li>
        <li>../foil/alphanumeric/numbers/</li>
        <ul>
            <li>../foil/alphanumeric/numbers/symbols/</li>
        </ul>
    </ul>
</ul>

Which cannot be accepted by the mcdropdown jQuery plugin, it expects something like this:

<li rel="1">
'Alphanumeric'
    <ul>
        <li rel="2">'Letters'</li>
        <li rel="3">'Numbers'
            <ul>
                <li rel="4">'Symbols'</li>
            </ul>
        </li>
    </ul>
</li>

To be frank, I don’t quite understand how the answer from that question works, I have been trying to modify that solution to cope with my situation, but still failed.

Any help and suggestion is much appropriated in advance.

Answer 1

If you already have the correct depth values, then you don’t need recursion. I have a similar function that I use for <ul>-<li>-generation:

function ulli($newlevel, &$level, $UL="ul", $once=1) {

  if ($level == $newlevel) {
     echo "</li>\n";
  }

  while ($level<$newlevel) {
     $level++;
     echo "\n  <$UL>\n";
  }

  while ($level>$newlevel) {
     if ($once-->0) { echo "</li>\n"; } 
     $level--;
     echo "  </$UL>"
     . ($level>0 ? "</li>" : "") . "\n";  // skip for final </ul> (level=0)
  }
}

It needs a current $level variable for reference (=$currentDepth). And you pass it your depth as $newlevel. It however needs the first depth to be 1.

Basic usage is like:

$currentDepth=0;
foreach ($array as $_) {
   ulli($_["depth"]+1, $currentDepth);
   echo "<li>$_[path]";
}
ulli(0, $currentDepth);

Well, quirky. But it worked for me.