Question

I have this PHP:

$ec = $trimmed['emails'];//has a value of "email"
$dc = $trimmed['date'];//has a value of "timestamp"

$data = array("email","domain","timestamp");

$num = count($data);

for ($i=0; $i<$num; $i++){

    if ($data[$i] == $ec) {
        $ec = $i;
    } else if ($data[$i] == $dc) {
        $dc = $i;
    }    
}

When I run this PHP $ec ends up equaling the location of domain and not email. Also, it is clear that the first if thinks both “email” and “domain” are equivalent to “email” because when I echoed out the loop the first time it shows $ec as “email”. Any ideas why?

Answer 1

Because on the second iteration $ec (which is now 0) is compared with "domain", which evaluates to true, proven with a simple var_dump( 0 == "domain");, which outputs true.

As William Van Rensselaer suggests below, you can either use ===, or check out the function array_search, which will accomplish exactly what you’re trying to do.

Example:

$ec = array_search( $data, $trimmed['emails']);
$dc = array_search( $data, $trimmed['date']);