Question

I have the following code in my app that will show a list of topics in alphabetical order and split them by the first tag name in each section block.

e.g:

A
animal
amazing

B
bat
baseball

The code is as follows:

<?php

    foreach($topics as $currentTopic):
        $thisLetter = strtoupper($currentTopic['Topic']['title'][0]);
        $sorted[$thisLetter][] = $currentTopic['Topic']['title'];
        unset($thisLetter);
    endforeach;

    foreach($sorted as $key=>$value):

        echo '<h3 class="alpha"><span>'.$key.'</span></h3>';
        echo '<ol class="tags main">';

        foreach($value as $thisTopic):

            echo '<li class="tag"><em>0</em>';
            echo $this->Html->link('<strong>'.$thisTopic['Topic']['title'].'</strong>',
                        array('controller'=>'topics','action'=>'view','slug'=>$thisTopic['Topic']['slug']),
                        array('escape'=>false,'rel'=>'tag'));
            echo '</li>';
        endforeach;

        echo '</ol>';

    endforeach;

    ?>

However as I have now split the array, I’m finding it difficult to access the other data in the array such as the topic slug used for the link as the $thisTopic variable just stores the title and the other required data. I also want to show the TopicPost count in the <em> as well so if a Topic has 4 related Posts show <em>4</em>

Currently doing what I’m doing gives the error: Fatal error: Cannot use string offset as an array because I’ve split the array…

Can anyone help?

If I debug the $topics array I get the following:

array(
    (int) 0 => array(
        'Topic' => array(
            'id' => '5',
            'title' => 'amazing',
            'slug' => 'amazing'
        ),
        'TopicPost' => array(
            (int) 0 => array(
                'id' => '9',
                'topic_id' => '5',
                'post_id' => '101'
            )
        )
    ),
    (int) 1 => array(
        'Topic' => array(
            'id' => '4',
            'title' => 'amazingness',
            'slug' => 'amazingness'
        ),
        'TopicPost' => array(
            (int) 0 => array(
                'id' => '8',
                'topic_id' => '4',
                'post_id' => '100'
            ),
            (int) 1 => array(
                'id' => '12',
                'topic_id' => '4',
                'post_id' => '101'
            ),
            (int) 2 => array(
                'id' => '4',
                'topic_id' => '4',
                'post_id' => '119'
            )
        )
    ),...

Answer 1

You get the error because you only store the topic’s title.

I suggest storing the whole topic info, instead of the title only:

$orderedTopics= array();
foreach ($topics as $topic) {
  $orderedTopics[strtoupper($topic['Topic']['title'][0])][] = $topic;
}

And then, to display it:

foreach ($orderedTopics as $section=>$topics) {
  echo $section;
  foreach ($topics as $topic) {
    echo 'Title: ' . $topic['Topic']['title'];
    echo 'Body: ' . $topic['Topic']['body'];
    //etc...
  }
}