Question

I want to tell my array to start from key position 2 and then loop through the entire array, including the values before key position 2. I just want to use one array and specify the key position I start looping from. For example, here I am using array_splice, but it does not do what I want it to, could you help me please?

$names = array('Bill', 'Ben', 'Bert', 'Ernie');
foreach(array_slice($names, 2) as $name){
   echo $name;
}

foreach(array_slice($names, 3) as $name){
   echo $name;
}

Answer 1

If the keys are irrelevant, you can splice the array twice, and merge the resulting arrays, like this:

$names = array('Bill', 'Ben', 'Bert', 'Ernie');
$start = 2;

foreach( array_merge( array_slice($names, $start), array_slice( $names, 0, $start)) as $name){
   echo $name;
}

You can see from the demo that this prints:

BertErnieBillBen

Alternatively, for efficiency, you can use two loops that are aware of wrapping around to the beginning, which will be more efficient since you are operating on the original array and not creating copies of it.

$start = 2;
for( $i = $start, $count = count( $names); $i < $count; $i++) {
    echo $names[$i];
}
$i = 0;
while( $i < $start) { 
    echo $names[$i++];
}

You could also turn this into one single loop, and just encapsulate the logic for wrapping around inside the for.