Question

I have a user that enters a piece of data into my database and titles it “Widget Title”. If he calls another item “Widget Title”, and another, and another, when he sees them in his widget list I’d like to show them like such:

• Some Item
• Widget Title
• Some Other Item
• Widget Title 2
• Widget Title 3
• Yet Another Item
• Widget Title 4

Where each duplicate occurrence has its own appended incrementing id.

Would you do this on the way into the database or when you display the output for the list?

Can I have the algorithm?

Answer 1

I just whipped this up in PHP for use on output and it seems to work well. Would you do anything differently?

    $my_titles_array = array('Some Title',
                         'Widget Name',
                         'Widget Name',
                         'Some Other Title',
                         'Widget Name',
                         'Yet Another Title',
                         'Widget Name'
                         );

$counted_values_array = array_count_values($my_titles_array);

foreach ($my_titles_array as $title)
{
    if($counted_values_array[$title] > 1)
    {
        $matches_array = array_keys($my_titles_array, $title);
        $i=1;

        foreach($matches_array as $match)
        {
            if($i != 1)
            {
                $my_titles_array[$match] = $title. ' '. $i;
            }
            $i++;
        }
    }
}

echo highlight_string(print_r($my_titles_array,true),true);