Question

I need some logic for the following problem, but can’t get my head around it. Basically I have some data like the following array

array(
    array('name' => 'Test1',
          'hierarchy'=> '1'),
    array('name' => 'Test2',
          'hierarchy'=> '1.1'),
    array('name' => 'Test3',
          'hierarchy'=> '1.2'),
    array('name' => 'Test4',
          'hierarchy'=> '1.2.1')
)

Now I would like to output an array in such a way that

$array[1] = 'Test1';
$array[1][2][1] = 'Test4';

Tried dynamic variable naming and dynamically creating multidimensional arrays, but both dont seem to work.

Answer 1

That’s not possible.

For $array[1] = 'Test1'; $array[1] needs to be a string, but for $array[1][2][1] = 'Test4'; it needs to be an array.

You could do something like this:

$array[1]['text'] = 'Test1';
$array[1][2][1]['text'] = 'Test4';

Here’s code for that:

$result = array();

foreach ($input as $entry)
{
    $path_components = explode('.', $entry['hierarchy']);

    $pointer =& $result;
    foreach ($path_components as $path_component)
        $pointer =& $pointer[$path_component];

    $pointer['text'] = $entry['name'];

    unset($pointer);
}