Question

I searching for a best practice in the Iterator interface of PHP.

Imagine I have a Menu with different Items. For each of the Items I can turn on or off the visibilty. Do you know a good place to place this filter? I thought about the Iterator::rewind() Method to do a seperate loop but dislike the fact of looping through the items a second time.

I think I see the wood for the trees. Hope you can help.

Answer 1

Have a look at the abstrakt FilterIterator class. Would look something like

class MyFilterIterator extends FilterIterator {
  public function accept () {
    $current = $this->current();
    // Test, if it is valid
    return $boolean;
  }
}

$iterator = new MyFilterIterator($myInnerIterator);

This way you also separate the menu from the filter, what makes it easier to replace the filter, if you want to change it.