Question

I have a multidimensional array and I’m trying to find out how to simply “echo” the elements of the array. The depth of the array is not known, so it could be deeply nested.

In the case of the array below, the right order to echo would be:

This is a parent comment
This is a child comment
This is the 2nd child comment
This is another parent comment

This is the array I was talking about:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [comment_id] => 1
            [comment_content] => This is a parent comment
            [child] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Array
                        (
                            [comment_id] => 3
                            [comment_content] => This is a child comment
                            [child] => Array
                                (
                                    [0] => Array
                                        (
                                            [comment_id] => 4
                                            [comment_content] => This is the 2nd child comment
                                            [child] => Array
                                                (
                                                )
                                        )
                                )
                        )
                )
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [comment_id] => 2
            [comment_content] => This is another parent comment
            [child] => Array
                (
                )
        )
)

Answer 1

It looks like you’re only trying to write one important value from each array. Try a recursive function like so:

function RecursiveWrite($array) {
    foreach ($array as $vals) {
        echo $vals['comment_content'] . "\n";
        RecursiveWrite($vals['child']);
    }
}

You could also make it a little more dynamic and have the 'comment_content' and 'child' strings passed into the function as parameters (and continue passing them in the recursive call).