Question

I have this in PHP:

$data = array("test"=>array("abc"=>"xyz"));

I want to append ‘data:‘ with array values, so output will be ‘data:xyz‘ for that $data array.

Its just a sample. How can I do this with multi dimension arrays. i.e; appending string with multi dimension array values ? Can I do with persistent values in same array so I can re-use this ?

Answer 1

If you don’t care about human-readability and just want to serialise an Array for later use:

<?php
$data = Array("test" => Array("abc" => "xyz"));
$str  = serialize($data);

echo 'data:' . $str;
print_r(unserialize($str));

// data:<some characters here>
// Array("test" => Array("abc" => "xyz"));
?>

If you’re trying to modify the original array such that the text “data:” is prepended to every value in the Array on every level:

<?php
$data = Array("test" => Array("abc" => "xyz"));

function f($array) {
   foreach ($array as $key => $value) {
      if (is_array($value))
         $array[$key] = f($value);
      else
         $array[$key] = "data:" . $value;
   }
   return $array;
}
$data = f($data);
print_r($data);

// Output: Array("test" => Array("abc" => "data:xyz"));
?>