Question

I’m basically formatting urls before sending my object to the view to loop through (with a foreach() on $submissions. The problem I’m having is that parse_url() takes a single index and not an entire array object.

I’ve got this method in my SubmissionsController:

public function newest() {        
    $submissions = $this->Submission->find('all', array(
        'conditions' => array('Submission.approved' => '1'),
        'order' => 'Submission.created DESC'
            ));

    $this->set('submissions', $submissions);
    $this->set('sourceShortUrl', AppController::shortSource($submissions));
}

In my AppController I’ve got this method which returns the formatted url:

protected function shortSource($source) {
    return $sourceShortUrl = str_ireplace('www.', '', parse_url($source, PHP_URL_HOST));
}

This works for single entries, but parse_url can’t take arrays, so is there a way in the controller to send the index of the object? E.g. $submissions[‘Submission’][‘source’] before I loop through it in the view?

My alternative was to do something like this in my shortSource($source) method:

if (is_array($source)) {
    for ($i = 0; $i < count($source); $i++) {
        return $sourceShortUrl = str_ireplace('www.', '', parse_url($source[$i]['Submission']['source'], PHP_URL_HOST));
    }
}

But that’s just returning the first (obviously). What is the best way to do this?

Answer 1

You’re on the right track. Check for an array. If it’s an array, call it recursively for each item in the array.

/**
* shortSource
*
* Returns an array of URLs with the www. removed from the front of the domain name.
* 
* @param mixed $source Either a string or array
* @return mixed $sourceShortUrl An array of URLs or a single string
*/
protected function shortSource($source) {
    if (is_array($source)) {
        foreach ($source as $url) {
            $sourceShortUrl[] = $this->shortSource($url);
        }
    } else {
        $sourceShortUrl = str_ireplace('www.', '', parse_url($source, PHP_URL_HOST));
    }
    return $sourceShortUrl;
}

In this recursive function, it will parse a single string or an array of strings.

// in the view
if (is_array($sourceShortUrl)) {
    foreach ($sourceShortUrl as $url) {
        // view specific code for URL here
    }
}