Question

I was wondering if it is possible to edit the current object that’s being handled within a foreach loop

I’m working with an array of objects $questions and I want to go through and look for the answers associated with that question object in my db. So for each question go fetch the answer objects and update the current $question inside my foreach loop so I can output/process elsewhere.

foreach($questions as $question){
    $question['answers'] = $answers_model->get_answers_by_question_id($question['question_id']);
}

Answer 1

There are 2 ways of doing this

foreach($questions as $key => $question){
    $questions[$key]['answers'] = $answers_model->get_answers_by_question_id($question['question_id']);
}

This way you save the key, so you can update it again in the main $questions variable

or

foreach($questions as &$question){

Adding the & will keep the $questions updated. But I would say the first one is recommended even though this is shorter (see comment by Paystey)

Per the PHP foreach documentation:

In order to be able to directly modify array elements within the loop precede $value with &. In that case the value will be assigned by reference.