Question

I have not worked with arrays much in PHP. I have a table of colors. I want to load it into a multidimensional associative array because I am going to be using that table a lot and don’t want to do selects over and over again.

I did:

$result = mysql_query("select * FROM color") or die(mysql_error());
$colors = "";
 while($colorrec = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
 $colors[$colorrec['ID']][0] = $colorrec['Description'];
 $colors[$colorrec['ID']][1] = $colorrec['HexCode'];
}

then when I want to access a colors information, I can just do something like:

echo "color code WHT";
echo "description ".$colors['WHT'][0];
echo "Hex Code ".$colors['WHT'][1];

Is this the correct way/methodology to do this?

Answer 1

$colors = ""; //what?? this should be array()

This should be something like:

$result = mysql_query("select * FROM color") or die(mysql_error());
$colors = array();
while($colorrec = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
   $colors[$colorrec['ID']] = array();
   $colors[$colorrec['ID']]['Desc'] = $colorrec['Description'];
   $colors[$colorrec['ID']]['Hex'] = $colorrec['HexCode'];
}

Then you can do:

echo "color code WHT";
echo "description ".$colors['WHT']['Desc'];
echo "Hex Code ".$colors['WHT']['Hex'];